The goal is to provide the person just jumping into HDR to find the best solution for them. I could go on and on providing you screenshots and examples like many of the other reviews out there, but that's not the purpose of this post. – it's all very easy to do in the Efex 2. You also have a variety of finishing options which are a nice touch. This is why it was such a big surprise when I fired up the new version and was met with a screen that I hadn't seen before.Īs usual I selected my brackets and then hit the “merge dialogue” button (they really need a better name for this), and then was presented with a screen I'd never seen before. I'd spent a lot of time in the first version of the software so I had a good handle on how it worked. This is a review for HDR Efex Pro 2 however, and they've made quite a few leaps in terms of usability and quality of final results. All of Nik's products work best in the Photoshop environment, and this is a big plus if you use their full suite of tools (I use Silver Efex Pro and Color Efex Pro all the time) I got my first copy of the original HDR Efex Pro a couple of years ago and it was my first introduction to Nik.Īs a standalone program I found it lacking, but I LOVED the integration with Photoshop. In this article we're going to compare it directly to Photomatix and help you decide once and for all which one is the right choice for your HDR needs. HDR Efex Pro is the real deal, and while it's not necessarily better than Photomatix, it's at the very least on par, and certainly has some advantages. It was about 17 seconds before my hesitation turned into excitement. With a bit of hesitation I decided to give it a shot and installed the software.

I've used that program and continue to use, it but I was skeptical to say the least when a friend of mine emailed me to say that there just might be some legitimate competition with HDR Efex Pro. I've been doing HDR for over three years now, and for at least half of that time there really was only one option for editing professional looking photos: Photomatix Pro.

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