- Photomatix Pro offers a number
of methods to process your image.
Depending on your scene and your preferences,
we'll help you decide on which method you use.
But let's take a look at the options.
So what processing method is the
best for this example of a photo?
Well this is one of those examples where
you could go a lot of different directions
and you can choose a method of processing
based on your vision for the final result.
Very realistic, very artistic, painterly, even fake.
Whatever you want to do, you can do in this situation.
So let's talk about the difference in the processes.
First of all there's tone mapping and exposure fusion.
And tone mapping tone maps the
32-bit file that has been combined.
Where exposure fusion is a much simpler kind of a process.
It's much like when you layer images
in a photo editor like Photoshop
and then you paint in and out the areas
you want to keep and that you don't want to keep.
In other words, it's going to look
for the best-exposed pixel for each
one of the pixels in the scene.
So exposure fusion has some advantages
because it is rather simple and easy to understand.
It's also much quicker and easier to get realistic results.
So having said that, let's look at each one a little bit.
Back to tone mapping first.
Right below the process option here,
there's this method pop-up menu.
Shows us three methods of tone mapping.
Many people probably think there's only one method
in all of Photomatix Pro, which is details enhancer.
And there's good reason for that.
That's the default method it shows
as soon as you open it up.
It's also very powerful.
You can really get all kinds of different looks from it.
A good way to compare the methods
and see which one might be best
is to use this filter menu up here above these presets.
Not only can you choose styles
such as artistic, realistic, et cetera,
but you can also filter for the method type.
So let's choose details enhancer first.
And there we see presets that are
with details enhancer only,
including the default preset that we see now.
So we can move up to these painterly types,
which makes it look a bit more extreme.
There's even one called surreal,
which as expected does not look real and kind of crazy.
There's some black and white presets.
Details enhancer is probably the most powerful
as far as recovering all the highlights and all the shadows,
and it doesn't have to look crazy either.
We can just choose a few items
to make it look more realistic.
Again, I'm not here to talk about each slider individually.
That's a whole other tutorial.
But we're looking at the differences between them
and what's best for panoramas.
And we just need to remember to click this
360 degree checkbox so that the sides line up.
So we can get a rather simple,
still realistic look like this one.
But the other methods are powerful, too.
Look at contrast optimizer.
Like the name says it retains a lot of realism
since it's paying attention to the contrast of the scene.
So although this is a darker look in the balanced preset,
it's also kind of considered the default
for the contrast optimizer method.
But we have a lot of powerful tools
to bring it back to the kind of level we're looking for.
Here's another good realistic option I would say.
Just with a few clicks.
And probably the most overlooked
method is the tone compressor.
Including, by me, it's been overlooked for some time.
I didn't really use it very often
until I spent some time with it,
realizing that it's a very good
method for realistic results.
If we use a tonal range compression
slider at a high setting,
we'll just crank it all the way up for now.
And from there just adjust the brightness,
we're able to get quite realistic results pretty easily.
So I highly recommend to explore that a little bit
and see where it works for you.
It's a simpler method.
Doesn't need the 360 degree checkbox
because it's what you call a global operator,
unlike details enhancer which is a local operator,
and it really pays attention to the
individual details within the image.
Let's move on to exposure fusion,
which I also highly recommend to spend some time exploring.
On the method pop-up menu, I'd like to start at the bottom,
because these are the lesser used ones.
So just really quickly I'll mention these.
There's fusion two images which
like the name says is really only necessary
when you have two images only.
Fusion auto doesn't offer any sliders or options,
it just does its best guess on its own.
Same with average.
But average is very simple and does what the name says,
averages out the pixels.
Sometimes useful but I haven't
really used it in quite some time.
Same with fusion intensive.
It's an older method of processing
looking for ways to make fusion more powerful.
But really the more new methods
are the fusion natural and fusion interior.
And moving up to fusion natural now,
you can see that right away as we
go to our fusion presets only,
and we'll click on the natural preset
to get the default settings for fusion natural,
you can see right away our histogram shows
that we've still brought all of the information
toward the middle of the histogram.
Succeeding in our goal with our HDR or fusion program.
And it's still a realistic result already.
Of course, we have plenty of options with which to work.
A 360 degree checkbox is the only one
that we really need to check here.
And beyond that, again, it becomes moving to taste.
So I'm gonna bring brightness down
a little bit in this case.
So again it's a easy way to get the job done
and I highly recommend that.
For the next one I want to show you an interior,
so we're gonna close outta this one
and move on to our interior scene
that we've processed in previous movies.
Interior scenes are notoriously difficult,
especially when there's a window to the outside.
It can be difficult to recover
the details in the highlights and shadows
throughout the image in such an extreme situation,
because those windows are so bright
and the area, some areas in the room are very dark.
Recovering all of those details
with tone mapping is not as difficult,
but it does take a lot of expertise
to do so and retain a really realistic look.
And to do that also might take post-processing.
This is where exposure fusion excels.
With fusion natural with no clicks or
just a couple of clicks I can have a very realistic result
and it's very usable for this kind of work.
One of the difficult areas, though,
in the interior is with those bright windows.
That brings us to our final type
of exposure fusion called fusion interior.
And if you look at the windows
as I choose fusion interior,
you'll see that they darken up right away
and recover a lot of that detail.
If I then just turn the brightness up for the room,
I still have a very realistic result with the windows.
Well as you can see there are a lot
of options for the settings you're going to choose
for tone mapping or exposure fusion.
And ultimately those are going to be
completely up to you and your preferences.