HDR Photomatix and CS5 side-by-side

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

This isn’t a huge in-depth comparison of the two products.  This past weekend I went to a car show and I did quite a number of handheld bracketed images so I could make some HDR photos.  Lately I’ve been using CS5 over Photomatix because I liked the results a bit better.  I wanted to see if that was justified so I processed the same set of images in both and did a split compare.

I tried to get the exact same look from each, but quickly realized that was a lost cause, so I did my best to balance the image in the same fashion with just a single HDR pass.  And here are my thoughts:

All in all I prefer CS5 final processed  image.  Even though the colors aren’t as rich as Photomatix, the noise reduction, ghost removal and reduced fringe coloring make it my choice for the moment.  I’m sure Photomatix will be coming out with a new version to address these issues and one up Adobe.  There is one case in which I’m using Photomatix over CS5 and that’s the batch processing.  When I’m doing real estate photos, I’ll have a set of a hundred bracketed images and need to combine those into HDR easily.

Is there a particular reason you use one product over the other?  I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.