Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on using the Smoothing settings in Photomatix. I've got the HDR photo of a Harley Davidson Sportster motorcycle loaded and visible in the Tone Mapping Preview window. This was taken from three bracketed photos. One was underexposed to bring down the highs, one was correctly exposed and the third was overexposed to bring out detail in the dark shadowy areas. This was converted into an HDR file, which is 32 bits, and now we're Tone Mapping to create the HDR effect. Within Photomatix the Tone Mapping is primarily accomplished by using the Details Enhancer, and this is what's responsible for that uniquely HDR look. You've got the General settings at the top followed by the Histogram, Tone, Color, and finally the Smoothing settings, which are down at the bottom. Now if you let your mouse hover over one of the triangles it talks about smoothing out local details as well as reducing low-magnitude noise. I have yet to really see where it reduces noise effectively by clicking the sky to open up the loop you can see a much tighter view and there's a lot of graininess and noise in there and if I just maximize each one of these settings Ð you don't see any change there with Microsmoothing, I can see tonal changes, but not really a noise reduction where I want it to occur. Shadow Smoothing, the same effect only doesn't reduce the noise there, but it affects the tone. Finally Shadows Clipping with the same effect. So, in my estimation the Smoothing settings are not that good for removing noise. It's more optimized to smoothing out, as it says, the details, which alters the tone, and I want you to focus on the tone of the image as I make changes here. Now I'm going to ramp my Crispening all the way up and you can see it went from a little bit more artistic look to a more photo realistic look in the image, and when I reduce that back down to 2, again, you can see it switch back. A little darker here, a little more contrast, and then when I increase Smoothing a little lighter, perhaps a little less contrast, exactly where this should fall for this particular image is completely an artistic decision, where you want the scale to fall on realism versus a little bit of artistry, or the tone of the image calls for this to be set. That's one general statement about how I work, is that I let the image dictate the settings. I find where the settings fit the image the best and really the image, the photograph Ð the scene Ð dictates, in some cases, what is done to it because some things look terrible even if I liked them on other photos. Alright. Let's look at Highlight Smoothing. I'm going to increase this to 100, you can see here a very large change in the tone on the right side of the building, and the sky is really bright and considerably back there. Turning it off reduces that. Halfway has a smaller effect. And that increases, maybe, the interest just a little bit. I'm not sure if that's needed and it probably increases noise so I'm going to turn that down. Shadow Smoothing works in the shadows and to me this reduces the contrast. And if you'll take a look at the border of the building at 100 that's a lighter-toned rusty color and then at zero, Shadow Smoothing leaves that a darker shade. Somewhere in between might be a good setting. Now I think you can see that generally speaking, there is a wide range between the Highlights and Shadows Smoothing where it doesn't look like anything happens and then all of a sudden it seems like a lot happens. Just one of those quirky things about it. Shadows Clipping Ð let's raise this all the way to 100, you can see the shadows turn dark, they're clipped, it's a much more gritty look. Turning them off and back to normal. You want to increase a little contrast, it's almost like moving the Black Point, raise Shadow Clipping. OK, I think from this you should be able to find a range of settings that work with each photo and remember, although the Help indicates that it's used for noise reduction, I don't think Smoothing settings improves noise. I use it for tone and for some artistry.