So, now that Lightroom is all set, I have moved onto my next quest - HDR. I downloaded the CS3 trial, but held off on installing it. Instead I downloaded the Photomatix Basic program, used it for all of 2 minutes, uninstalled it, then downloaded the 3.0 Beta(9). The Beta is just that, a Beta, I got it to crash in under a minute. This morning I downloaded Beta 10 and it won't even display an image when loaded (nice!). So I uninstalled it and reinstalled Beta 9 and played around with some shots I'd been staging for the past 3 months or so (basically bracketing on occasion to get to try HDR at some point).

I was able to learn that HDR isn't what I wanted, Tone Mapping was what I wanted. I am down with Tone Mapping. I was able do some Tone Mapping (via the Beta) on single Raw files. I really liked the results, but then I decided to compare the results to my PaD photos (I was playing around with a few of the PaD originals). I had problems telling the difference, actually I kind of preferred my PaD photos over the Tone Mapped ones.

So I decided to install CS3 and play with its HDR capabilities. CS3 is NOT Photoshop Elements, there are a lot more ways to shoot yourself in the foot in CS3. Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson, even though I installed 2 other products that had the updated ACR (4.3), when you install CS3, it doesn't install with the latest ACR. And, if you don't have the updated ACR AND you try to do an Automate | Merge to HDR, nothing happens! Nothing, no warning dialog, no crashing, no odd sounds, just nothing. You are left with a sort of empty feeling. You are pretty sure something is not right, but you aren't familiar with the situation, you figure something is happening, it's just happening in the background. And it is so efficient, its using 0% CPU! So, yeah, I checked and CS3 had the wrong ACR.

OK, so I got all this stuff happening on my PC, I head out and take some shots that will be perfect for test HDR images. When I got back home and tried them out, they kind of sucked. I have to spend more time on HDR (just like I need to play with the Stroboscopic mode on my 580EX2...).

So, that is why I have a BW of a door. I do like this shot, its just nothing like what I'd wanted it to be.