Photomatix Pro

Digital cameras make it quite easy to take a picture of a beautiful scene, and that’s a good thing. But when you get home, you notice that the pic you snapped is nothing like the beautiful scenery you witnessed, especially if you took the image on a cloudy or overcast day. The thing is that in poor lighting conditions, the chances of your pic being ruined are quite high. Enter Photomatix Pro, HDR photography software meant to do away with this nuisance. This HDRSoft-developed tool will take multiple photographs at varying exposure levels and merge them into an HDR image. You get to play with the settings, so you will end up with a stunning photo.

The Photomatix Pro installation file for Windows (there’s a Mac version as well) is 7.3MB in size, which isn’t much. On a high-speed internet connection the download will take little time to complete. The application can be installed on anything from Windows 7 down to Windows 98. The setup wizard that shows up when you run the aforementioned installation file asks you to choose the installation directory and pick if you want to install the Lightroom Export plug-in. It doesn’t ask you if you want a desktop shortcut. It creates one by default.

The grey interface displays the classic File Menu in the upper left hand corner. Underneath it there’s the Workflow Shortcuts pane that has buttons for loading bracketed photos (samples are available on the application’s site if you don’t have any such photos), batch processing bracketed photos, batch processing single photos, and more. There’s even a very useful Tutorial button. Click it and you will be presented with a quick tutorial of Photomatix Pro. Go through it to better understand how to use Photomatix Pro.

It isn’t difficult at all to get started with Photomatix Pro. All you have to do is feed it some photos shot with different exposure values and it will turn them into good looking HDR images. The application comes with automatic blending, unlimited stacking, easy comparison of results and batch processing. You can take several images and merge them into an HDR image. You can then adjust the settings as you see fit by using Exposure Fusion (to make them natural-looking) or Tone Mapping (to make the look surreal). You can come up with amazing images from photos that don't look very well.

They say that seeing is believing. Well, if you don’t believe that you can come up with some spectacular looking images using Photomatix Pro, then I invite you to check out the gallery available on the application’s website. The images are stunning – there’s no better way to describe them.

Please note that Photomatix Pro is only free to try. The trial version will put a watermark on the output.

Don’t let poor lighting conditions ruin a beautiful shot. Let the Photomatix Pro application help you come up with a stunning image even on those cloudy days.