unsupported image format

What do y'all use for HDR processing? I've tried CS6, but I can't seem to get very good results out of it. I'm either dense or it still needs refining. It is better than CS5, but something seems to be lacking.

I've found the plug in to be perfect for Aperture until now, I'm starting to think I may need to look at other HDR options.

I've got aperture 3.5.1 and using the Mavericks. I have this probably not so good habit of just updating everything the moment it is offered as an update.

Suppose I should update my profile on here, I forget about that information.

I have both the photomatix plugin and stand alone program. Their stand alone program is a pain to use, totally a pain. The workflow is unacceptable: initial import into Aperture of all files, then export the ones I want to use for HDR. Then go through the awkward selection and HDR process (flow on the stand alone isn't good), then save to a folder. Then reimport the final product into Aperture.

The plug in was so seamless with Aperture: click the pics I want, it pulls it in, does the work, saves right back in Aperture. Boom, done. The work around for the stand alone is only acceptable for someone who doesn't have Aperture. The additional features are things like sharpening, contrast, all the normal stuff I can do on the fly in Aperture.

Let me take a look at that article you linked, appreciate the communication.

Here's the response I got from photomatix:

I can certainly understand your frustration, this bug is proving to be quite a nuisance! The worst part is since this is being caused by a bug in Aperture that only Apple can fix, our options are very limited.

The only thing our engineers can think of that could be done from our end is to avoid the issue by completely changing our plug-in to make it a simple export plug-in that uses Photomatix Pro to do it's processing and then re-imports the processed image back into Aperture (similar to how the Export plug-in for Lightroom works, if you're at all familiar with that one). However, this would take quite a lot of engineering time, so the plug-in would not be ready for a while. And, all those efforts would be made useless if Apple fixes the bug in the meantime.

We are absolutely interested in finding any solutions to this issue though; this is affecting many users and we want to be able to do whatever we can to help. I know you must be tired of trying workarounds (especially since so far they seem to have not worked), but if you don't mind giving one more a shot to see how it goes, we have heard from another user that found a systematic workaround that avoided the issue on his end. These are the things he noticed:

If he highlights 3 pictures in the Browser view (the one that shows small icons of all the pictures on one page), that resulted in the unsupported image error. But, if he instead selected 3 pictures and hit Enter to view those 3 pictures in a window, and then invoked the Photomatix plug-in, the error did not occur after processing.

We would really appreciate if you could try that and let us know the outcome for you, as knowing if that workaround clears it up for you may give our engineers a hint about what triggers the bug in Aperture and potentially give them ideas to explore to make the plug-in avoid the Aperture bug. Thank you very much in advance if you choose to do that.

I did try their recommendation, made no difference.