Tone Map: Photomatix Pro

Notes on Tone Mapping

Here, I was happy to see that the image did not contain too many halos where the sky meets the mountain—it gave me a little of bit of wiggle room when working with the tone mapping. I moved the Strength to 100 and increased the Smoothing. I wanted to bring in the detail in the trees, so I increased the Microcontrast, but any changes in Microcontrast usually make the image darker than normal. To counteract that, I increased the White Point and made the Gamma a little brighter. I increased the Color Saturation a little bit, but avoided making it too saturated, as this would cause dark halos where the trees meet the sky. Then, finally, I increased the Luminosity. Another problem in this image is the big contrails, but there’s a good chance I will remix a sky from the original images to make this one work. This is common in HDR photographs where you shoot outdoors in the middle of the day against the sky.