Photomatix Pro 4.0 Released - Free Upgrade for Version 3.x Users

HDRSoft has released version 4 of Photomatix Pro. It is a free upgrade for version 3 users.

Main new features in v4.0:

• Selective deghosting tool: enables users to select ghosted regions with a lasso tool, and change the preferred image taken for each selected region.
• Preset thumbnails panel: built-in and user presets for tone mapping and fusion show as thumbnails in a panel alongside the preview. Panel can be set in horizontal or vertical orientation.
• High quality noise reduction with new algorithm applied on source images (users can still use the old algorithm when the noise reduction is applied to the merged 32-bit HDR image).
• Ability to tone map a single image in 8 bits/channel mode.
• Unified dialog for HDR Tone Mapping and Exposure Fusion methods.
• Viewing of tone mapping or fusion settings embedded in processed image.
• Improved rendering of Tone Compressor tone mapping method with default settings and extension of the range of the Tonal Range Compression setting.

Other updates in v4.0:

• Option in Preferences to customize default filename.
• Alignment with the “by matching feature” method now takes into account perspective correction in addition to rotation, translation and scaling.
• Faster upsampling of preview for tonemapping/fusion, with zooming control in the form of a slider instead of a stepper.
• Dialog enabling to adjust options when opening a single RAW file in order to tone map it.
• Batch of single files adds options for noise and CA reduction and RAW conversion white balance and color space.
• Transfer of lens information when available in source images in TIFF or JPEG format, or Canon RAW files (other camera manufacturers apparently encrypt the information).
• Transfer of XMP metadata information from the source to the resulting image.
• Embedding of tone mapping and fusion settings in images saved as JPEG (previously was only when saved as TIFF).
• Changed options in Preferences to bypass dialogs so that in enables to bypass all dialogs till tonemapping/fusion instead of just the dialog asking what to do with the dragged files.
• Faster processing and reduced memory usage for Fusion/Adjust.
• Ability to move selected slider and to zoom image using the mouse wheel.
• Photomatix Pro is now minimizing itself when reimporting into Lightroom.
• Added “Save Image” menu options which directly saves the file with default name and location set in Preferences, without showing dialog prompting for filename.
• Extended time for automatic bracket detection of batch processing from 8 to 64 seconds.
• Enabled zoom factor of less than 100% for the zoom slider of the Tone Mapping preview window, and adjusted fit-to-screen to replace the upsampling from the smallest size by a downsampling from the medium size.
• Set the DPI setting for exporting with the Lightroom plug-in to 300 pixels/inch instead of the Lightroom’s default of 240 pixels/inch.
• Made the Lightroom plug-in ignore the error returned by Lightroom when importing a photo that is already in the catalog.
• Added support for reading PSB files (8, 16 and 32 bits/channel).
• Multi-threading support added to RAW demosacing, parts of fusion/adjust and last part of “by matching features” alignment.
• Bug fixed: When the metadata of source files contained hierarchical keywords set in Lightroom, the hierarchical keyword structure was not preserved in the tone mapped tiff file.
• Bug fixed: Black Point setting for Fusion/Adjust had almost no effect
• Bug fixed: Opening a panorama displayed with a height of less than 400 pixels could make the HDR viewer crash.
• Bug fixed: Panning an image using the scrollbars could sometimes show a trail.
• Bug fixed: With some raw files thumbnails did not show on browser for loading files.
• Bug fixed: Loupe was opening on top of status bar when the task bar orientation is set to be on top.
• Bug fixed: Saving as Radiance when the image has a width higher than 32768 pixels produced invalid files (Radiance files need to be written uncompressed in this case, as RLE-compression requires that the image is less than 32768 pixels wide).

Photomatix 4 Single Image HDR Example

I thought I'd try a single image HDR for a problematic shot from Venice last year. On the left is the RAW image without any adjustments as exported from Lightroom 3.2. On the right is the single image HDR generated via the Lightroom plugin with no adjustments in Photomatix; after it was reimported to Lightroom a slight graduated filter was applied to the sky and exposure was reduced by -0.4. It took maybe a minute to create the image on the right.

EXIF: D300, Nikkor 17-55, 1/250s, f/8.0, ISO 200, EV -1 1/3

Eduard - I use Photomatix Pro, and the plugin with Aperture 3. This is a substantial update. Thanks for posting it. That's a good shot of Venice. Photomatix Pro 4 Single Image HDR did wonders for it.