[HDRI] Re: NYT article

[Geraldine Joffre]

Hi Erik,

I would be interested to know whether your rating of the tone mapper offered in Photomatix as poor 
is based on a comparative survey. If such a survey has been conducted, what were the criteria used 
for rating the algorithms? What was the background and number of participants of the survey? And 
which settings have been used for producing the Photomatix results?

Please note that only a fraction of the photos tagged with HDR at Flickr have been produced with 
Photomatix. There are other software offering tone mapping capabilities, and of course Photoshop 
CS2 is the most well-known and used by photographers. I believe you are grossly overestimating the 
popularity of Photomatix. Furthermore, most of the Flickr's images produced with Photomatix have 
been post-processed in other imaging software, and therefore are not the direct output of its tone 
mapper. 

Photomatix offers user controls to parametrize the algorithm to the user's personal taste, and many 
at Flickr seem to like to dramatize the effect with settings that are far away from the default values. 
The approach of Photomatix is to let the user decide what is best for his/her photos, and not have it 
imposed by the engineer who designed the algorithm. Photoshop CS2 apparently follows the same 
approach, as its "Local Adaptation" HDR Conversion method allows a great deal of control over the 
mapping, better than with Photomatix in fact. 

Why should a software be blamed for allowing photographers to adjust the settings and produce 
tone mapped images that specialists in HDR imaging consider non-photorealistic? 

Photomatix is intended for photographers and not for 3D artists or other categories of users. 
Photographers in general do not wish to produce photorealistic images. They are not interested for 
instance in adding motion blur to make their images look photorealistic, as motion blur is precisely 
what photographers want to avoid. The same applies to HDR and tone mapping: most photographers 
are not interested in taking several exposures for HDR if the final result is going to be a 
"photorealistic" image that looks like a dull Low Dynamic Range photograph. 

Geraldine Joffre

On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:07:10 +0100 (BST), E. Reinhard wrote
> Hi Santiago and All,
> 
> I've just had a look at this article, and the images are
> quite obviously created with a program called Photomatix.
> This program combines multiple exposures, and also has a
> tone reproduction algorithm built-in.
> 
> Unfortunately, most people on Flickr using HDR are using
> this program. My annoyance stems from the fact that the
> tone mapping algorithm produces very unnatural results, and
> is about the poorest algorithm that I know for dynamic range
> reduction. It is very easy to recognize Photomatix output as
> a result --- it looks too compressed with too much local
> contrast.
> 
> The apologetic comments at the end of the NYC article about
> the unnatural look of the Photomatix output makes no sense to
> me. There is no good reason to offer such a poor tone mapper
> as the only choice in any program.
> 
> As a result, the Flickr community is starting to equate HDR
> with non-photorealistic rendering, which in my view is very
> undesirable. The NYC article is not helping in that respect
> either, as it does not present a balanced view of the state
> of the art in HDR.
> 
> High dynamic range imaging is an exciting technology for many,
> as it allows us to take pictures and do image processing that
> we couldn't do before. However, I feel that Photomatix, in
> combination with its apparent, but undeserved popularity on
> Flickr, is doing more harm than good to help establish HDR as
> a useful technology.
> 
> Right, that's me finished venting.
> 
> Cheers,
> Erik
> 
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