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Part Two – Tone-mapping (Natural)

There are five main presets in Photomatix Pro for tone-mapping. They are Compressor Deep, Black & White, Smooth, Grunge and Painterly. We will see what each one produces in turn without any additional editing. Compressor Deep is the only one that has a different set of editing tools, the other four all use the same editing options. This post will cover the two that have the most natural look, namely Compressor Deep and Smooth

So let’s look at Compressor Deep first. The editing options are:

Brightness – Default preset to -6.0

Adjusts the overall brightness of the image

Tonal Tange Compression – Default preset to 6.5

Increasing the compression has the effect of moving the shadows and highlights towards the mid-tones. In effect lightening the image.

Contrast Adaption – Default preset to 3.0

Increasing the value tends to have the effect of more “pronounced” colours

White Point - Default preset to 0.000%

A higher value increases the global contrast, a lower value reduces highlights clipping

Black Point - Default preset to 0.000%

A higher value increases the global contrast, a lower value reduces shadows clipping

Temperature - Default preset to 0.0

A positive value enhances the yellow- orange and gives a warmer feel, a negative value enhances blues and gives a colder feel

Saturation - Default preset to 0.0

The higher the value the more intense the colours, it effects each colour equally

Compressor Deep

Ok so after a few minor edits the image now looks like this, essentially all I did was lighten the image and enhance the colours and contrast.

Compressor Deep (edited)

Let’s now have a look at “Smooth” and see what the unedited version looks like.

Smooth

Editing Options available for Smooth are:

Strength

Enhances contrast and detail

Colour Saturation

Controls the saturation of the RGB colour channels, the higher the value the more intense the colours

Luminosity

Controls the compression of the tonal range, a higher value boosts shadow detail and brightens image

Detail Contrast

Controls the amount of contrast applied to details, the higher the value the sharper the details look but will also have the effect of darkening the image

Smooth Highlights

Reduces contrast enhancements in the highlights, useful for preserving a uniform blue sky or reducing halos around objects

White Point

A higher value increases the global contrast, a lower value reduces highlights clipping

Black Point

A higher value increases the global contrast, a lower value reduces shadows clipping

Gamma

Controls the mid-tone of the image, brightening or darkening the entire image

Temperature

A positive value enhances the yellow- orange and gives a warmer feel, a negative value enhances blues and gives a colder feel

Micro Smoothing

Smooths out enhancements in small details, useful for reducing noise in sky

Saturation Highlights

Adjusts the colour saturation of the highlights, can be useful in creating effects in Black & White HDR editing

Saturation Shadows

Adjusts the colour saturation of the shadows, can be useful in creating effects in Black & White HDR editing

Shadows Smoothness

Reduces contrast enhancements in the shadows

Shadows Clipping

Useful in reducing noise in dark areas of the image

Smooth (edited)

Enhancements were made to shadow saturation and colour saturation mainly and smoothing reduced. Obviously you will edit your pictures differently to suit your taste. I am not trying to show you what you have to do, more highlighting what you can do to images. Of course you can if you wish get very surreal with the images. For some images this works very well. For others it will not work and completely ruin the image. Once again this is down to personal taste. In part three we will look at the “Surreal” side of tone-mapping focusing on the “Grunge” and “Painterly” preset options.

Click here for Part One

Click here for Part Three

Click here for Part Four