Location : The front at Seaview, Isle of Wight.

Seaview is a small Edwardian resort located on the north-eastern corner of the Isle of Wight, overlooking the entrance to the Solent. It was shortly before sunrise when I captured this HDRI looking towards the beach.

This image was photographed using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkIII camera and a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5 L II lens. I used Live View focusing at 10x on the benches. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/11, ISO 100 and daylight white balance. I captured a series of 11 exposures from 8 seconds down to 1/125th of a second in one-stop increments. The RAW processing, creating and saving of this 32-bit HDRI file was all done in Photoshop CC. The HDRI TIFF was then opened and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro 5. All final adjustments were done back in Photoshop CC.

I have been asked many times why I first build the HDR image in Photoshop and then Tone Map it in Photomatix Pro, since it seems the logical thing is to do it all in one program. I appreciate the image quality you can get from the full control of Adobe Camera Raw. You should always take a lot of care to set the white balance controls, the lens correction and the noise reduction to the optimum for the HDR image set. You can then simply save all the images as TIFF files for processing in Photomatix Pro, but since the Remove Ghosts option in Photoshop is so good I find it better to build the HDRI directly in Photoshop CC. Turning off Align Images when building the HDR image in Photoshop is the best bet. It doesn’t appear quite pixel-accurate, because it will slightly blur my tripod shot images. You can now save the HDRI as a 32 bit TIFF file in Photoshop CC for export to Photomatix Pro 5. I personally love the look you can get with Photomatix’s Tone Mapping. There are lots of adjustments to play with, allowing you to get just the look required for the subject. The Bottom Line is that Photoshop offers a much better raw converter – and it’s also really great at removing ghosting when required. However Photomatix offers a very specific look with its tone mapping adjustments that I find very attractive. I really do enjoy using the best of both worlds.

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