Monday, April 9, 2012 – Good Morning and welcome to another great week!!  I recently made a purchase that I had been putting off for a long time and I am really happy that I did so!!  Saturday I purchased Photomatix Pro made by hdrsoft.  This piece of software assists in making High Dynamic Range photographs.  So I spent that night working on making something useable as well as three to four hours straight on Sunday and I think that I have something that I can at least show to make a comparison.  The first picture will be straight from photoshop using the merge to hdr pro function, saving the 32 bit radiance hdr file, then changing the mode to 16 bit allowing for toning.  I used the LAB technique that I posted about so the colors will be boosted quite a bit.  And the second photo posted will be using photomatix with noise reduction and sharpening done in photoshop.  On a side note a lot of the photos I took had quite a bit of noise in them zoomed in to 100% and shot at ISO 100.  I will be investigating this as I have had problems in the past with surf shots and this cannot continue.

Next I’ll post the picture using photomatix to merge the photos and tone with additional noise reduction and high pass sharpening done in photoshop

What I can say for sure is that this software makes images look surreal which is pretty cool!!  I’ll be posting more images in the days to come.  Have a great day!!