Hi everyone!
In the last few months I've approached to HDR photography, understanding its real potential. But even if the theory is very simple to understand, when it comes to practice it's very hard!
At the moment my workflow consist of blending 3 exposures in Lightroom and then process the new image in Photoshop + Nik collection. I think Lightroom produce quiet realistic HDR images for the 80% of the times, but other times it's very limited in what you can do. That's why I'd like to move to digital blending using Photoshop's luminosity masks. But I'm really bad in obtaining good results. I've discovered that there are several tools that simplify a lot this process. I'm talking about Raya, Lumenzia and TK Actions. Since they're not free and there isn't a trial version, I'd like to know what you think about them and what you'd suggest to use if I just want to use them for digital blending. I think I don't want to use other features, because I use Nik collection and at the moment I don't see any reason for changing it.
You don't need to buy anything.
The panels you're mentioning are simply "shortcuts" to macros that perform the in-between steps.
You can do these steps manually, and of course, you can also create the macros yourself and then it'll all be a matter of a single click.
You can also use Jimmy McIntyre's Easy Panel which is free and does more than what you need to be creating nice photos blended via Luminosity Masks.
What you need to "study" is read and practice how you can get the proper exposures which will allow you to create the best and/or perfect masks.
I'm currently playing with Easy Panel and you're right, you don't need much more. But sometimes it's still quiet difficult to mask a layer properly just using luminosity. That's why I was wondering if using additional plugins like the ones mentioned above could help me or they're just the same thing with a much cooler GUI. Other people is suggesting me to use software like Photomatix, but even If don't have any direct experience, I've always read opinions from good landscape photographers saying that with those tools you can't obtain realistic results as you can get with digital blending. I have to say that at the moment I'm having same issues with digital blending.
PhotoMatix is for HDR processing.
I passionately hate HDR, and so do most of the "elite" or just passionate/serious landscape photographers.
Your instinct was right, steer clear from HDR and PhotoMatix.
For the masking, what most people giving away or even selling Luminosity Masks tutorials and tools aren't telling you what probably is the best secret to nailing awesome masks:
an extra exposure, purely captured for masking, in which you over-expose the sky getting high contrast between it and the land/subject, carefully exposed though, not to allow any blooming to occur ( google sensor bloom if you're not aware of the phenomenon )
Thank you Bill, I really appreciate your suggestion. I know it's going to be an hard work obtaining realistic results, but I'll do my best effort starting from your suggestions!