HDR Photography: A Tutorial

For the beginner

For what is offered it its a good deal at the price but know it is for the beginner wanting an immediate solution. The Photomatix discount is a nice bonus and keep in mind Photomatix does not break the bank. If you were looking for an in-depth reveal then you will be disappointed.

The author has laid out the book very cleanly and simply and a concise navigation to the topic. The pictures enlarge and work well for the iPad. Video tutorial production was very well done and spoken very clearly and articulate.

Overall, well written with great picture examples and well produced videos. Stating the obvious, but you will need Photoshop and Photomatix to follow along.

What would I have liked to see? You need to realize you can do HDR in Photoshop alone and that Photomatix has plugins for Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom. Therefore I would have like to see this book cover creating HDR images more completely with topics like:
- using Photoshop alone to help justify need for Photomatix
- using the Photomatix plugin to Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom

What I found odd with the author praising using RAW files the processing was done using JPG files which are 8-bit colour and lossy compression and could bring in artifacts due to compression.

Know that Photoshop and Photomatix support OpenEXR which would be more ideal to use after processing the RAW files or using 16-bit TIFF through the whole process is better than introducing JPG.