May 012010
Photoshop CS5 has arrived! Among many anticipated features is Photoshop’s new implementation of HDR functionality. But, the question is, can it unseat Photomatix as the standard in HDR imaging?
I decided to explore this question by experimenting using a set of 3 autobracketed exposures I recently captured in High Park. I had headed out on a beautiful spring evening on a Sunday in early April in anticipation of some nice colour in the slightly cloudy sky at sunset. I found a great location with a winding path, a park bench in the foreground, and some trees that would provide interesting silhouettes against the evening sky. Using Magic Hour on my iPhone, a great app that provides copious location-based information about sunset timing, I knew I would hit the peak sunset lighting conditions. I snapped off a series of sets of 3 autobracketed exposures at +2EV, 0EV and -2EV as I usually do with my Canon 40D equipped with my EF-S 17-55 F2.8 IS USM lens, my widest lens at the moment. When the light eventually started to fade and there was little red or orange shades remaining, I concluded my mission to capture good raw material for HDR processing.
I actually didn’t process the frames until after CS5 was released and I downloaded and installed it yesterday. However, in Photomatix, I have set up a bunch of presets corresponding to the type of shots I’ve been working on. I have some urban landscape presets, some daylight natural landscape presets, and 2 sets of into the sunset presets – one set that seems best in urban settings with the textures of streets and buildings, and the other better suited to natural landscapes with trees and lots of green.
In very little time, using my usual workflow based in Lightroom 2.7 with the Photomatix plug-in integration, I tested a few of my sunset natural landscapes presets, found one I preferred and rendered what I considered a successful image. Here it is:
High Park Winding Path Sunset - Photomatix Reference
With that done, I set out to explore CS5′s HDR tool. Working in Local Adaptation mode and using the built in presets as a starting point, I found that the Photorealistic preset was the closest available starting point. From there, I adjusted most of the settings in the 3 main sections of the HDR Pro control panel – Edge Glow, Tone and Detail, and Color and Curves. It took 10 or 15 minutes of adjustments until I started to get a more intuitive feel for what each slider controlled. This is much quicker than the learning curve in Photomatix, which has a lot more settings with less immediately meaningful labels. Soon, I saved my first preset and created this image:
High Park Winding Path Sunset - CS5 First Attempt
Upon review and comparison in Lightroom, I noted 2 main deficiencies compared to my Photomatix reference image. First, the sky was a much lighter, more cyan shade of blue. Second, the foreground elements were a bit lighter and with much less contrast. So, I reloaded my 3 exposures into the HDR Pro tool and tried again. I focused mainly on a better match of the darker blue colour in the sky and spent most of my time making adjustments to the highlight, shadow and gamma sliders in the Tone and Detail section. 5 or 10 minutes later, I saved a second preset, and produced this image:
High Park Winding Path Sunset - CS5 Second Attempt
This is closer, but I noticed that I had created a lot of glow around the branches against the sky and headed back into Photoshop to try to correct that. Focussing on the range of tones being produced in the open sky areas, and making adjustments primarily to the sliders in the Edge Glow section, I managed to create this version which, overall, was the closest match to the Photomatix image so far:
High Park Winding Path Sunset - CS5 Third Attempt
However, once I looked at it more closely in Lightroom, I noticed some very unattractive blown out highlights in the edges of the foliage in the evergreen tree just to the right of centre. This was produced by overemphasizing the bright light filtering through the thinnest foliage, and had resulted from the more aggressive edge glow settings I had settled on. So, I went back to CS5 a fourth time to see what I could do with those glow settings and produced this fourth CS5 image:
High Park Winding Path Sunset - CS5 Fourth Attempt
Overall, this seemed quite good, but correcting the glow around the evergreen had pushed the sky back up to a lighter shade that didn’t seem to fit the scene as I recalled it as well as the darker blue and purple shades of the Photomatix image. Also, the detail in the branches against the sky is not as satisfying and the green of the grass in the park lawns is not as rich. The sharper, but still realistic textures of the tree trunks in the bottom left area of the Photomatix image are also rendered as dull and murky by comparison in the CS5 image.
Overall, CS5 produces a pleasing image. For a lot of scenes, it can probably create excellent HDR images, far better than the results possible with CS4. I’m going to explore with some other scenes in the next few weeks, especially to explore the ghosting controls compared to Photomatix. I suspect Photomatix will prove superior, but I’m looking forward to some specific examples.
Meanwhile, I would say that if HDR is not a focus of your photography, but a nice occasional distraction, then CS5 is a perfectly adequate tool. If you must have Photoshop, it’s probably not worth the extra purchase of Photomatix. However, at this point, I think Photomatix is still the champion of HDR quality overall, and the best tool for the most control and highest quality HDR images.
