If you don’t know if HDR is for you and want to try your hand (or photography) at it, you have the option of of your choice of various 30 day trials for plugins and software.  But if you are like me, sometimes you get distracted and those trials run out or you may not have the time to really vest yourself into a new technology.  So a free program for HDR photography like HDRtist by Ohanaware may be what you are looking for.  It’s simple… really simple.  Drop the photos on the app and you have a single strength slider to control the look.  It appears that it’s more than just exposure blending, so you can make your HDR anywhere from bland to really punchy.  But if you want something funky, you’ll have to blend images from different scenes.

Here’s where you come in: Give HDRtist a try and tell me what you think.  I’m not affiliated with them in any way, just curious if you think a single slider bar is enough, even for freeware.

I got a comment about another HDR application by Unified Color entitled HDR Expose.  And after only testing it on one set of images, I must say I don’t like it yet.  It took it nearly 20 minutes to  merge the 3 RAW images when both Photomatix and CS5 only took a couple of minutes on the same machine.  I know that one data point isn’t a good reason to completely denounce them.  So I’m not.  The proof is in the image.  After all if the image is that much better, then the extra processing time is worth it.  But I found the image to be noisy.  Fortunately they have their own noise reduction algorithm which seems to work rather well.

So after my one image test I can say there’s nothing really endearing me to HDR Expose yet.  But I’m going to have to test it on a lot more images.  It could be my computer got hit by a stray cosmic ray and caused it to process really slow.  And my ignorance of their interface is also a problem.  I’m going to give it a fair shake over the month and see if it performs better than I originally tested.  Below is the same image processed through HDR Expose.

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.

Photo is a shorted form of photon or light.  What we as photographers use to create our art.

Graphy is the art of drawing or image creation.  This doesn’t mean just still images.

80+ years ago film and photography was accessible only to a handful of people. Then around 40 years ago film became popular and cameras abundant in various formats allowing anyone to take photos on a poorer quality medium over the commercial quality. I remember the little drive up buildings where you could drop off your film for 2-day processing, that was quick turn around. Then 20 years ago the notion of digital images come to the public conscious and 10 years later it became a slightly expensive but very prolific and we soon saw the downfall of film and those little drive up buildings. Today you can get a mobile phone that has a camera in it with enough megapixels to rival the grain of any film produced. I know that the lens quality is not the same, but that’s not the issue. This has caused film to become a cottage market. The only thing that has changed is the medium.

In much the same way commercial photographers have had to adapt to the changing medium and the way people want to consume information. Forty years ago there were only a handful of TV stations but thousands of printed magazines and newspapers. News photographers used black and white film because it was less expensive to develop and the newspapers only printed black ink. High end commercial photography required color for the glossy printing in magazines. Now those magazines and newspapers have had to move their markets to the Internet (the go to place for all information) and have had to adapt to consumer desires. There is a greater demand than ever for still images, but coupled with that is the demand for the story to be told to the consumer in the form of video. So the still cameras have evolved to capture motion and the commercial photographer is now required to capture video as well as still image

There will always be a place for iconic photography. That one image that strikes a chord in the viewer to draw their attention to the article or video attached. The same is true with portrait photographers are now faced with consumers wanting photos on a disk for facebook, yet there will still be a need for large framed photos as artwork. As photographers we now have new mediums to consider. And in order to excel as photographers we have to consider that the word photo in photographer no longer means a physical image printed on archival quality paper. Photographer means an individual who is skilled at capturing light and telling a story with either a single or many images.

Should photographers then change the name of our companies and businesses to exchange the word photography and photographer to something more appropriate?  I am at that point now that I have been doing just as much photography as videography.  So in the upcoming weeks the site will change with a slightly different name.  It’s only purpose is for customers to better understand what I do and can do for them.  But should I still refer to myself as the Time and time photographer?  It is after all where I started, even if my business will be changing from Phil Morris Photography to Morris Media Group.