Image location : St Mildred's Church, Whippingham on the Isle of Wight.

A small medieval church the design of which is a mixture of Romanesque and Early Gothic. This is the church used by the Royal Family, including Queen Victoria when she was in residence at Osborne House.

The image was captured late morning using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkII and a Canon TS-E24mm f/3.5L II. This camera has been modified to capture IR (Infrared) light and also block visible light, so the colours captured are not normal. The camera was set to Manual with 1/125th second exposure at f/8, ISO 100 and using Live View focusing at 10x on the front wall. The RAW processing was done in Photoshop CC. The final image adjustments were done in NIK Color Effects Pro.

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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