HDR shooters rejoice, Photomatix 4 is here.
The new version of everybody’s favourite HDR processing tool offers a number of new features and refinements, including:
- 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.
I’ve been playing with Photomatix 4.0 for a few months, and the presets thumbnails is one of my favourite features, allowing me to see what the image will look like processed a certain way before I go through the hassle of processing the image that way, only to discover that didn’t actually work.
My other favourite feature is the ability to tone map a single image. While HDR isn’t a popular technique for portrait shooters, as most people tend to move just a little bit between exposure, this feature does allow wedding and portrait shooters the ability to play around with HDR techniques. Before this, I would sometimes export three copies of the same image, one stop over, one stop under, and combine as an HDR, but this is much, much faster and cleaner.
In my experimenting, the software isn’t very nice to skin, meaning my standard workflow has been to export the image from Lightroom to Photomatix, then over to Photoshop where I open up a second copy of the original image and blend the HDR background with the non HDR subject:
Our Pre-HDR composite is murky.
After Photomatix, the skin is mostly blown out, but the rocks and sky look great, so the shot is round tripped to photoshop to bring back original skin tones, and to bump the saturation and contrast. Photomatix 4 automatically opens the image in Photoshop, though you can turn this off.
How does the new Photomatix stack up to the much-ballyhooed HDR feature of Photoshop 5? No idea, as I haven’t been able to afford Photoshop 5. Which is one of the great things about Photomatix 4. It costs $99, but is a free update for pre-existing users.
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1 Comment at "Photomatix 4.0 review"
Thanks for the review, Trent. I haven’t used Photomatix before, but it looks interesting. As for the CS5 HDR feature, there are actually two: Merge to HDR Pro (under File>Automate) and HDR Toning (under Image>Adjustments). The first one requires multiple images, which are either stacked RAWs (not good for portraits) or one image you’ve done several conversions of and then saved each time. The second one is a glorified Highlights-Shadows adjustment.
I’ve played with it a couple of times and each time was underwhelmed. Come to think of it, I haven’t got the content-aware healing brush to actually do a clean heal on anything, either, and that was also much-hyped.
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