Much easier to reach this stage

Like the shot two up before this one in this review, almost from the same spot in Powell Point, Grand Canyon at sunset, I had been limited to using only one frame because of ghosting. I was shocked because there only was the tiniest movement handheld between exposure bracketed frames. I spent quite a lot of time afterwards making very necessary improvements in Photoshop but straight out of Machinery I get much the same with little or no additional work whatsoever.

I am sold on Machinery Effects. Several bracketed exposure projects I could not process before give wonderful results very quickly and easily. With it I can even merge exposures when people are in the frames and have moved around very noticeably and I still get no ghosting.

Until discovering Machinery, I was using other HDR software that did an excellent job except that it was useless with handheld exposure bracketed shots (almost all mine are) and even those on a tripod if there was the tiniest amount of movement in any of the frames. Quite the opposite with Machinery, so it has become a very welcome alternative and I now entirely rely upon it.

In the preview file size, Machinery is fast. Of course, later when you want to create a full size image, it slows down a lot, but the preview stage means you get very good interaction with the controls when you are figuring out the needed settings. I have rarely had any ghosting and the results are as good or better than anything else I have ever used, sometimes by a huge margin.

At first I missed there being no history, which can make trial and error adjustments easier to make and then to make a choice from, except that with Machinery I am now getting near to perfection quickly, often with no intervention at all over what is done automatically in the merge and initial tone mapping. As a result, I am now beginning to doubt if I would actually ever need to use the history or presets. Machinery does have the latter though, if you want to try them.

There have been about thirty updates in the three years I have been using Machinery. In my opinion, it was pretty good at the outset and additions to my mind are nice to have but not essential. Others may rely upon them more than I do, so I suggest you try out the trial version for yourself to make a judgement of all the features.

One feature that occasionally I find useful; is batch processing, where you first run one set of bracketed exposures through and save a preset. This is very useful where you want to merge each set and then stitch into a panorama, as having the same settings makes the blending of them trouble free.

This is a great product.

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