Photographers know only too well that if you expose the foreground correctly , the sky will burn out. And if you try to capture sky details, the foreground will turn into dark shadows. With Photoshop you can sometimes assemble a composite shot that includes the best of both, but the technique is hit and miss, as well as laborious.
Photomatix Pro solves the problem by giving you two options. You can bracket a range of exposures and collect them into an HDR file, or you can use a 16-bit file and manually control what Photomatix calls the Tone Curve, which is like the Levels tool but much cleverer. The bracketing option is very much like Photoshop’s own Merge To HDR feature, but you can then apply the Tone Curve effect to create a stunning composite with a perfect combined exposure- take a look at the series of examples on the site to see what this means in practice. Combining exposures also smooths out noise, which is useful because the one drawback of using Tona Curve with a single image from a budget camera is that noise can become more obvious as a result.
Overall, Photomatix looks like a one-trick pony. But the trick turns out to have hidden depths and can produce some eye-popping results. It’s not an essential purchase, but if you take an SLR with you wherever you go and are looking for some dramatic and original new effects, it’s a winner.
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