The Roudoule river and a very few words about Picturenaut my brand new HDR toy

The Roudoule river near Puget Thenier in Provence

Another just processed from my summer archives.

The contrast between the water and the shadows under the trees was just a little too high for a very good single shot, so i decided to shoot 3 exposures to be able to try some HDR processing. I left the files sleeping some months and just reminded them this evening.

The original images where done by a windy day and the exposure times where around one second. To avoid too much ghosting artifacts in the foliage i just used 2 exposures in my HDR work. The most and the less exposed.

As i had just downloaded Picturenaut from HdrLabs i decided to use these images for a little first test and comparison with Photomatix.

So as usual i processed my raw files with SilkyPix and run the full hdr workflow first in Picturenaut and the in Photomatix. Here are my first impressions :

- I'm a long time user of Photomatix but i have to say that i was seducted by the GUI and speed of Picturenaut.

- Between the 3 or 4 tonemapping operators of Picturenaut i could not find any one that give the same results that the Detail Enhacer of Photomatix. I was a little desapointed but i've to say that Picturenaut must certainly be a very good tool for natural looking HDR images.

- I was surprised because the Picturenaut result was free of any ghosting artifact in the foliage while the image processed with Photomatix had many. Note that i don't say that's a general behavior. Some algoritms can work better with some images than with some others.


So, at the end i had my 2 tonemapped images and guess what i did :)
I blended the forest from the Picturenaut result with the river from the Photomatix one. No winner but i had a nice fun with this little experience.