joehel2 wrote:
Your post was very helpful for someone, like me, who wants to get into HDR photography. I have a Nikon D300 and decent lenses but have not decided on the software but was leaning toward Photomatix. In your test which program did minimize time at the computer?
I think that Photomatix produces the best overall results, has a wide default library, and offers a good range of global slider adjustments. Nik is a very close second, offer what I consider to be big advantage of providing local adjustments using their "point technology", and was very intuitive to use. If you are working on a MAC, HDRist Pro, which as I mentioned produces results that are too bright but which can be easily modified in Lightroom, Photoshop, or similar, is a steal at 1/3rd (or less) the price of the two big players. The bottom line is that whatever you use, you are going to want to do, as has been mentioned, some post processing. Neither the default settings nor the in-HDR-software adjustments seemed to do enough for me.