Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been experimenting with HDR photography using Photoshop Elements 8 for a while now and have had very good results. Although I have to pin-register the images and blend them by hand, which is time consuming, overall the results are consistently well worth it. When I researched Photomatix Pro, I thought that the tone mapping feature would reduce my editing time and give me more uniform results. However, I ended up returning it to Amazon. I noticed that when I merged multiple exposures using Photomatix, it had a tendency to produce some very odd artifacts in the final image. I did not notice this problem until I zoomed in to see how it handled ghosting and image alignment. I discovered areas where there were patches of odd colored, usually dark or black colored pixels, that were completely unlike anything in that part of the image. In some instances, this was even more apparent in areas of lower and higher contrast. In one image, I noticed a rock in the foreground in which the lower portion was literally "missing" about half of its pixels. Photomatix had inserted these dark colored pixels in and around the area on the rock where the image data was simply gone. I think that if you use Photomatix to create HDR images for the Internet or for small prints, it's usable I suppose, but if you like to print 8x12 or larger sized images, be advised that this product creates enough artifacts in the final composite image that I cannot recommend it.