Two snaps of the Boston skyline, taken from the Moakley Courthouse. The first was done using Photomatix, the second with Ariea HDR MAX.
Please note that this is my first attempt at a daytime HDR. I've done many night HDRs in the past, but never a day time one. It was also the first outing using my new 50D. And this isn't a great subject, since there wasn't an extreme amount of dynamic range in the scene.
All those "caveats" aside, these HDR pics show a hell of a lot more detail than I could get from mucking with Lightroom and Photoshop. So this is a somewhat worthwhile test of playing with daytime HDR.
Photomatix
Ariea
A few observations...
The noise created/exacerbated by Photomatix was terrible. I had to run it through Neat Image - something that was not required by Ariea.
Ariea's default image was incredibly "lifelike" and true to the scene, rather than Photomatix's exaggerated effects (which I'm coming to appreciate). It actually took me quite a bit of tinkering to get Ariea to appear more like the Photomatix output, which was the first of the two done. Ariea's initial image using the default settings was quite dull, really. But it was easy to get it a bit more "snap".
Ariea *sucks* at aligning images. I took the pics hand-held, and Ariea could not get them algned worth a damn, whereas Photomatix was perfect in this regard. I had to use CS4's auto-align (a most-cool feature), re-save, and pull those new JPGs back into Ariea.
Using Photomatix's interface was faster, and more pleasant to use. Ariea likes to pause without any indication that it's doing anything. All in all, Ariea's interface needs a bit of work. It's not bad, it's just not perfect.
I can't say if one worked faster than the other. Neither used all 4 cores of my system, something that CS4 does regularly.
Ariea's interface is a bit more intuitive when attempting to get "more realistic" results. Photomatix's interface is easier to get those "exaggerated" effects.
I still have to play some more...
