Welcome Surprises

Sometimes you discover great things when you aren't looking, or at least when the path you are on takes an unexpected turn. I've had a run of such things lately.
 
When creating the "Changing Seasons" post, I realized that I had not prepared the last image so I restarted Photomatix Essentials only to see a notification from Avast that the program was infected with a virus. Now, I love Avast for protecting my PC and highly recommend it. I've never seen a problem like this before and still can't figure out what went wrong. To make matters worse, Avast quarantined the program file and I could not figure out how to get it out of quarantine.

At this point the only solution was to download and install a new copy of Photomatix Essentials. When I started it, I discovered that interface looked different. It turns out I had upgraded from version 3.11 to 3.23. I would not have known except for the change to the list of presents.

Photomatix Essentials 3.11

Photomatix Essentials 3.23

Instead of one "Painterly" preset, now I have 5 to choose from in addition to several new options. This is very cool.

So this gets me to wondering, what else has been added in the way of new features?

I've long heard about the benefits of saving images in RAW and so I've had my camera set to save in RAW and JPG, but on Canon cameras the RAW files are CR2 and not all software supports this variation. In fact, Photomatix Essentials had always been able to import these files, but always gave me an image that looked like is was sepia-toned, except it was purple instead of sepia - totally unusable. So I decided to try CR2 files in the new version - they work just like they should! My initial experiments with RAW have born out that RAW produces much better results.

At about the same time, I saw a posting that there was a new open source alternative to Adobe Lightroom, called Lightzone. Most of the info that I found about Lightzone pointed to Lightroom and since I don't use Adobe software, I started reading and searching for info on Lightroom. This lead me to some tutorials on hdr101.com and digital-photography-school.com and I discovered some articles about HDR using one image, and a series by James Brandon on the Basics of HDR Photography. The first of the series emphasized the importance of knowing your camera well, and spending lots of time with the user guide.

I decided that James had some good advice, especially since some settings on my camera have been a bit annoying since it came back from the lens repair, so I dug out the manual and settled in for some quality time. WOW! I am blown away by the capabilities that I had missed from when I first reviewed the book when I purchased the camera.

The best camera feature that I discovered was the ability to save the current settings to "Custom Settings". I'd always found it inconvenient to open the function menu, scroll down to Auto Exposure Bracketing, activate it and then exit the menu. I'd also groused about how I wished I could add switching to AEB to the lens ring control. Well, Custom Settings may be even better than what I wished for. Now I just rotate the dial on the top of the camera to "C" and I'm in AEB mode - very cool!

So now I'm off on a new adventure - to see what I can do with RAW in Photomatix Essentials, including processing single photos instead of a group of three, and to see how Lightzone can improve my workflow and enable me to do things in HDR that I've not even dreamed of. This is fun!