Have you ever photographed something that you just couldn't get everything to look just right? You expose for the dark areas, and the light ones are blown out, or you try to get the detail in the light areas and the darks areas are just have no detail; they are just black and shadow. Sure you can bracket some exposures and then through the magic of masking in Photoshop, or your favorite editor, you can piece something together, but that turns into a lot of work.

Photomatix 3.0 is a program that can make that problem go away; or at least make it easier to deal with. Photomatix can help you to fix your blown out highlights as well as your flat shadows by offering two different solutions. First is through exposure blending where differently exposed photographs are merged into one with an increased dynamic range. The second is from tone mapping which is used to map a set of colors to another set to approximate the high dynamic color range. This is done because monitors and printers have a limited dynamic range and cannot handle the HDR without the mapping.

Photomatix 3.0 is a stand-alone program that runs on Mac OS X and Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista. The Tone Mapping tool is also available separately as a plug-in that is compatible with Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

A High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI or HRD image) is an image that is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values possible so as to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to deep shadows. First developed in the 1930's and 40's by Charles Wyckoff, it has only recently taken off due to the availability of digital cameras and available computer power needed to process the image.

The standard method of creating a HDR image using Photomatix is to take a series of exposures changing only the f-stops. You need a minimum of three exposures generally bracketing a "normal" exposure. That is, you would first take a good, balanced image where some of the lights are washed out and the darks are faded. Then you take one 2 f-stops lower and one 2 f-stops higher (-2, 0, +2 most often work fine). Then you combine them in Photomatix for your new image.