Tone Mapping
Ξ October 21st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Tutorials |
Tone mapping is the tricky part of Photomatix here you will see something that you can use. Very tricky is how to adjust the settings to get a nice balanced image.
Luminosity
Adjusts the brightness of the shadows. Moving the slider to the right has the effect of boosting shadow details and brightening the image. Moving it to the left gives a more natural look to the tone mapped image.
Strength
Controls the strength of local contrast enhancements.
The optimal value depends on the image and the effect you want to achieve.
Color Saturation
Controls the saturation of the RGB color channels. The value affects each color channel equally.
White Clip – Black Clip
From watching the way the histogram changes, the white clip adjusts the highlight contrast and the black clip adjusts the shadow contrast.
Micro-smoothing:
Basically this setting should be called “How arty do you want your shot?” At 0 you can get the cool arty style HDR images with all the detail in everything from walls to clouds you didn’t know where there. However, if you want a nice simple blended exposure photo set it to 30. 95% of the image should be perfectly exposed as if you spent hours putting them together in Photoshop. This is a great new addition to Photomatix as it allows people to use the software as they see fit. If they want a nice photo that is perfectly exposed then they can get that just as if they used ND Gradient filters on their lens. However, if like me they want something a bit more unique they can drop the micro-smoothing down and get something dramatic.
Light smoothing:
Do not set this under 0 because you will not see something good.
Microcontrast
Controls the accentuation of local details. The default value (High) is the optimal value in most cases. However, this control may be useful in the case of a noisy image or when the accentuation of local details is not desirable