Photomatix Pro 3.2 and the Details Enhancer

I have a copy of Photomatix Pro 3.2 (64 bit) that I've been running on a new Windows 7 machine.  I subjected my test sheet from two posts ago to Photomatix to see what would happen.  The results were interesting to say the least.  The unmodified test sheet is here:

As you can see it's an overall gradient with two regions of nested dark and light squares.  In addition there are 1-pixel wide black and white lines running the length of the picture.  At the lower left quadrant there is a set of white and black lines intersecting with similar gray lines that are nearly invisible.  What happens when we expose this to Photomatix?

Frankly there isn't any combination of settings in Photomatix Pro that can make this look acceptable.  Most of the settings produce terrible results.  Let's look at the default settings for 'Details Enhancer' and what they do to the sheet.  Here it is:

This is hideous.  To be sure, the background is an even gray without artifacts - acceptable.  The dark squares have a reasonable, even good, degree of separation - acceptable.   But the white squares are all mushed together at about the same level of gray:  It appears to be a zone lower than middle gray.  And they are primarily distinguished by their edges.  But what about all the artifacting clustered around the straight lines?  They look like the Northern Lights.  I don't think there is a way to produce that in Dynamic Photo HDR 4.  Not only are there flares all along the straight lines but there's a weird compartmentalized effect in the black squares.  The straight lines overlaying the squares cause the toning algorithm to radically shift gears.  The even performance of DPHDR4 is missing.  And, worst of all, the huge flare in the white squares starting at the second black line and flaring upward in a bright band.  Let's see if we can fix this.

     If we turn the strength and the luminosity all the way down we can fix most of the straight-line flaring and much of the compartmentalizing behavior.

Frankly, this is about as good as it's going to get.  In order to get any reasonable result we had to turn the strength and the luminosity down to the minimum and that still does nothing for the gross flaring in the center of the white squares.  What we have at this point is, basically, minimal HDR.  We have good separation in the black squares and barely distinguished white squares.  These are separated by what looks to be about 2% decreases in brightness from the edge to the center over a whole brightness range of about 10%.  And we still haven't been able to touch the flaring that originates at the black line that crosses the white squares.

    I couldn't find a combination of settings for Details Enhancer that would eliminate the flaring.  In order to get rid of the gross flaring in the white squares I had to set 'Light Mode' to 'Max':

But now the flaring has returned to the lines passing through the dark areas of the field.

These are, I believe, the most important controls for Details Enhancer.  My readers may know more about how to set these controls in an optimal manner.  But for now the performance of Photomatix Pro lags significantly behind Dynamic-Photo HDR 4 at least for this sheet.  The flaring around the thin straight lines bothers me.  I've always thought I could detect a certain mushiness in this product and if it's true that any setting of 'Strength' above 0 leads to artifacts then that might (and I mean 'might') form part of an explanation.

Next time I'll go into more detail about the 'Tone Compressor' algorithm.

Bob Consoli