Photomatix makes dusk look like noon.

Does anyone else have this problem with Photomatix. let's say you're shooting a dusk outdoor scene. The sky is getting dark, street lights are glowing, cars have their headlights on, etc. So you bracket the shot with the plan to use Photomatix so that your shadows don't black out.

When Photomatix finishing processing, you look at it and you're impressed with how good it looks. But, wait, it looks like you shot the scene at noon. That's not the look you were going for. You want it to look like dusk not noon.

Is there a way to fix this? Or is that just the way it is?

I think most would agree Photomatix is a starting point. The result is exported to -insert your pixel editor here- and edited to taste.

The problem with photomatix is that it tries to lighten the dark areas and darken the bright areas. That is what you want it to do of course, where the shadows are concerned, but it doesn't differentiate between dark shadows and a dark sky, it doesn't magically know which you want it to work on and which to leave alone.

In that situation, I tend to take the various bracketed images and blend them myself in photoshop, so I can use parts of the lighter original image to bring up the shadows, but use the middle image, or a darker one if preferred, to provide the sky. Areas with light sources can be dealt with using the darkest image to cover the actual lights (and lit shop windows too, to retain detail in the interior display).

It's more work, but you get to make the decisions on every part of the scene, to get it looking exactly how you want it, rather than how photomatix 'thinks' you may want it to look. The software has no concept of the subject or your intentions, just areas of light or dark tones, so cannot give you your perfect result.

Typically, there is not a lot of dynamic range across most of the scene at dusk, but you are trying to compress the range of the scene that has a relatively low DR with tiny bits of much brighter lights. Is it really important to preserve detail in the street lights, or whatever the patches of brighter light might be? if this is the case, you need to throttle back on the DR compression to preserve global contrast, or take the tone mapped image and blend it back into one of the original exposures that preserves the overall look you want. You may get better results by blending the best overall exposure with one that is underexposed and preserves the patches of bright light in the scene.

Kirk