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Provides: Creation of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Images
Developer: hdrsoft
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4 or greater, G3 or Intel processor, 500MB of disk space
Premium Retail Price: $99 (the Photomatix Pro Plus bundle with a plug-in for Photoshop costs $119)

Photomatix 4 continues its domination of the HDR Photography landscape with its new release of version 4. The big news is that hdrsoft has now provided an excellent mechanism to deal with objects that have moved during your multiple-image capture. In addition, Photomatix now displays a sample strip of thumbnails to let you quickly see and click to display your image in a variety of presets prvoided by Photomatix (you can also create your own). These presets let you easily view an image with either Image Fusion or Tone Mapping to help you determine which approach might give you a better look for your image.

Some form of HDR photography has been around as long as Ansel Adams was capturing Half Dome at Yosemite many years ago. The need comes from the simple fact that neither film nor digital cameras can capture the range of light that the human eye can see. When we are outside on a bright day we can easily see the subtle shades and textures on our house whether we are looking at where the sun is shining bright on the walls or in the shadows under a bush. With a camera, we either have to set our exposure for doing the sunlight or the shadows, never both. Photography is a game of compromise: whatever you want, you have to be willing to give up something else to get what you want. To get shots with a lot of contrast, you need to accept the fact that you can't just snap the shutter and your done. There will be post-processing of that image and if you are willing to accept that, you will be obtaining images that are otherwise impossible. What Photomatix has done is to make the process as seamless as currently possible with the greatest amount of success.

If you are unfamiliar with how to take HDR images, I've added a short primer at the end of this review. But one word on the dynamics of HDR photography. A JPEG image is an 8-bit image. That means there's 2 to the 8th power of red, 2 to the 8th power of green, and 2 to the 8th power or blue, or just over 16 million bits of data. A TIF image can also be 8-bit or it can be 16-bit. The later one provides 32,769 per channel which gives a total of 3.5 X 10^13 bits of data. But even that is not enough information-potential to contain all of the data that is in a full HDR image. For that you need a 32-bit image. But there's a catch. Very few printers or monitors can display all that information. Thus, to take an HDR image, one must first create an HDR image from multiple LDR images and then convert the result of that merging into a LDR (low dynamic range) image so that it can be viable seen or printed. This conversion to LDR is called "tone mapping" and is a juggling act that makes light things darker and dark things lighter so that the global and local contrasts in an image are balanced out in an acceptable way. Got that?

[A number of years ago I reviewed a much earlier version of Photomatix for Applelinks and that review can be read here. Since I've not reviewed this application in some time, some of the features mentioned in this review are not necessary new to this release but are of note and importance to the development of Photomatix.]

As before, Photomatix continues to opens faster than just about any application I've ever dealt with. Double-click the application and it's open. Boom!

After starting Photomatix, this lone "Workflow Shortcuts" toolbar will be sitting on the left side of your screen. From here you can start combining images by clicking on the top button or starting a batch process by clicking on the bottom two buttons. Not until you have something open will the grayed out buttons be of any service.

Although you can start by clicking on the top button, I generally find that it's easiest to drag images directly from Adobe Bridge right onto the Photomatix icon in my Dock. If you do click on the button, a window pops up and you can either use the Browse button to collect the images or you can simply drag the images into a well region in the window. As before, you can use either jpeg, tif, or raw images to generate final images with Photomatix.

The first step in creating an HDR image is to create the 32-bit image. To generate that you need to check off what you need to adjust in the Preprocessing Options window shown below. The "Align source images" is not new and neither is the "Reduce chromatic aberrations." To enhance the ability to use raw images, the "Reduce noise" has been improved to let you work on either the source images or the merged image . If you are using raw images you are better off fixing the "source" images. The only limitation here is that you have to go through the entire process to see if you did a sufficient amount of noise reduction. From my testing, it seems that the default is sufficiently good combined with taking photos with no more than ISO 100.

The big new feature here is the "Reduce ghosting artifacts." While the "Automatic" feature has been there for some time, the "Semi-manual" is new and is outstanding. [Note: the new anti-ghosting features are only available for Tone Mapped images and will not work at all for any Image Fusion images.]

The "semi" in Semi-manual simply means that Photomatix needs you to identify the ghosted regions that will require "de-ghosting," Photomatix will (mostly) do the rest. When this option is selected, after clicking OK in the box above, a new window will be generated that shows a basic-tone mapped image but clearly lets you see sections in the image that have ghosting. In the images below you can see the step process you need to go through to fix the ghosting: First you drag a simple ring around the area of concern and then right-click (Control-click) that region to formally let Photomatix know that this is an area with ghost images. At that point you can again right-click (Control-click) within the ring to select which of the images to use to remove the ghost image or click on a button on that window that tells Photomatix to process the image and you can view the results of that process. If you didn't like that pose, position, or results, you can step back to the selection process and again right-click (Control-click) inside the ring to select a different photo for Photomatix to use for the ghost. Hopefully, one of those images will provide a good result.

Do the results work? Below is the section of the image as done by Photomatix using the Automated process. Before version 4, that's as good as you got. Below that is the result of what version 4 can do. Simple put, the need to wait for all cars to go by, breezes to stop moving leaves, kids to freeze, dogs to play dead, etc. when you want to take an HDR image are now over. Well, mostly.

The one area where I did find problems is when there are multiple levels of movement: big objects, small objects, and nothing moving. Let me explain. I took some photos of the Mount Washington Cogwheel train in New Hampshire. Here you have a background (not moving), the train (moving), and people (moving inside the train moving separately). I tried this issue with both Photoshop's new HDR Pro features next to Photomatix's approach. In the Photoshop's result below in the top image, you can see the leaves in the background are caught. I was able to get the train isolated but not the engineer inside nor the items in his cab. Photomatix, on the other hand, nailed the train and the contents of the train but I could not get the leaves behind the train to lock in. Apparently, as Photomatix was trying to align the images, it was unable to distinguish between the train (a large component of the whole image) and the background and chose to align the train, not the background. As such, aligning the contents of the train was a piece of cake. I did resolve this problem in my final image, but that's not the scope of this review.

Once you've accepted your de-ghosting (if necessary), and moved onto either Fusing or Tone Mapping your image, your workspace looks as below. Things are mostly very similar to what Photomatix provided earlier, but there are several changes and alterations to this new workspace.

The biggest and obvious new feature is the new Preset selection strip better shown below in a closer view. This floating strip shows various thumbnails of how your image might look by selecting either the Tone Mapping Enhancer, Compressor, or some of the Fusion (image blending) approaches within Photomatix. You could save your presets before with Photomatix, so the concept is not new. What is new is that you can now see what you are looking for with your presets better than you can remember how you worded things. Those who might be best helped with these presets are those new to HDR so that they can do "settings autopsies" to see an HDR look and see how the settings were placed for that look. Of interesting note is that Photomatix does not use a "generic" image for these thumbnails. Rather, the presets show you what the image you are working on will look using those settings.

Those who have been using Photomatix for some time and have already established what they want to see might not find the various Preset images of great use. However, since you can create your own presets, it's easy to save some image types (e.g., lots of sky, mostly shadow, rivers, desert, etc. to quickly set off pretty much what you need prior to fine-tuning the images to make the final result great.

The one thing about the Presets Strip that I really didn't like is that you can't resize it yourself. It will occupy as much space as it chooses it wants to use and that's it. While I can accept the width (when in vertical view) or height (in horizontal view as above) limitation as constrained by the size of the thumbnails, the inability to resize the number of thumbnails in view seems strange. If there's not enough room for all the thumbnails to fit on your screen, there is a scroll bar to access all of the thumbnails so the capability to resize is potentially there. One other annoyance: there is a command in the View menu to close the Presets strip but it doesn't work. If you manually turn it off via the Red close button (upper left), you can reopen the Presets with this setting but you can neither close the Presets nor prevent it from opening in subsequent activity. Until this is fixed, you are stuck with the Presets Strip showing up every time you open a new image to tone mapp.

Other enhancements to Photomatix Pro 4 is that processing an image via Tone Mapping or Fusion is much more transparent and easily accessed. As shown below, after creating the 32-bit image for tone mapping, you still can go back and explore the potential for Fusing the images. This cuts down on the experimental time for processing images so that you do not need to go back and forth from the proto-HDR images (the images used to create the final image). [Note, if you removed a ghost image for tone mapping, it will return if you process the image using the Fusion approach.

As before, you can flip back and forth from either the Details Enhancer or Tone Compressor approach to Tone Mapping as shown below. My only complaint/wish with the ability to easily switch back and forth from the various approaches is that there's no way to quickly save any of the approaches before you go off and try another. Yes, you can easily save any of these as a preset, but I'd like to see a checkbox to hold THAT one setting while you try a different processing approach. Thus, try Tone Mapping - Details Enhancer, lock those setting and then try Tone Compressor, and then lock those settings. Click back and forth from one to the other and compare. Then tryout the various Exposure Fusion adjustments and simply click back and forth to see the differences. Currently each time you click out of an approach you lose all previous settings. Thus, with one hand they make it very easy to try different approaches and with the other hand they make it more frustrating (unless you take the extra time to save each setting one-by-one as you work.

The adjustments panel has gone through various improvements including access to the various settings groups can be accordioned opened or closed. The biggest frustration/limitation on this is that you cannot scroll up and/or down via the mouse's scroll wheel. On the other hand, as opposed to the Preset Strip, you can resize this as far as your screen allows. Thus, if your screen is tall enough to display everything, than scrolling is not required.

Although not new to Photomatix 4, the user can switch the Smoothing function back and forth from the Light mode approach to the more fluid sliding-control mode. Below you see the Light mode approach toward Smoothing. If you uncheck the Light mode checkbox, you are offered the slider approach.

Be advised that there is no direct relationship between any of the limited five position of the Light mode and the position of the slider in the non-light mode. That is, if you have the settings as shown above and flip back to the Light mode and click on Minimum, when you uncheck the Light mode, you will still find the Smoothing slider at +6. Clicking back and forth only provides two different approaches on how to obtain image smoothing and do not give you subtle fine-tuning on the Light mode.

As stated, you can save any of your settings for subsequent reuse. If you want to visually see your settings, this can be done after processing your image. While your image is still visible in Photomatix, bring up the Workflow Shortcuts palette and click on View Settings. This will bring up a new window detailing all of your actions on that image. You do not need to Save your settings prior to seeing your settings. Another curious thing is that when you first open the Workflow shortcuts, items that were not accessible were grayed out. The View Settings is not grayed out even though you cannot use that function until you've processed and saved your image. Prior to that, clicking on this (apparently) life button does nothing.

The last big change is the ability to resize an image to best fit your monitor. The image below is a close-up on the top left of the window holding your image in the main workspace. There are three main views of your image: 1/8th, 1/4th, and 1/2. From these starting points you can zoom in or out to better see parts of your image or you can click on the "Fit to screen," button to get a best fit via Photomatix.

This re-sizing approach seems to have worked out many of the kinks and limitations over past re-sizing, it works well.

In short, hdrsoft continues to push Photomatix to the lead in HDR processing. Despite the amazing gains that Photoshop has made with their HDR Pro, one still cannot obtain the detail and range that is fairly easy to obtain with Photomatix. hdrsoft has made significant strides in removing ghosting from images. While it's still possible to take a photo with too many moving objects in play, the results that Photomatix can achieve on "normal" movement is spectacular. What I have demonstrated in the train images in this review is that Photomatix does need to provide the user the ability to define what's moving and what's not moving in an image when aligning images. I have to also add that I'm a bit disappointed in the few glitches still on display in this release. The fact that you can't resize the Preset strip is annoying and the fact that you can't stop it from appearing or the Command key option to remove it doesn't work is not very encouraging. Nonetheless, the strides that Photomatix has made in de ghosting make this a profoundly desirable upgrade. I'm giving this a 4.5 rating, but that will show up as a 5. Such is life without fractions.

There are a number of HDR processing programs available to the photographic consumer. Photomatix is one of the original and is still one of the best.

An HDR primer:

To achieve a good hdr image, you need to take a minimum of three bracketed images with your camera either on Manual or Aperture mode. While some point and shoot cameras can do this, not all can. Your goal is to take (at least) one image that's underexposed, one that's set for proper exposure, and one that's overexposed. The catch is that this should be done only varying the shutter speed which is why you need to be on manual or aperture mode. Lastly, your shots should be 2 stops apart. Thus, the minimum exposure should be something like -2, 0, +2 EC (Exposure Compensation) apart. You can use your camera's exposure bracketing to do this for you. You can hand-hold your camera as long as the slowest shutter speed of the 3(+) shots is fast enough to not cause blur due to your hand movement. If there's any question, grab your tripod. For long exposures (> .5 seconds) use a remote shutter release.

You may see people bragging that they took a gazillian shots 1/3 EC apart, but they are only wasting their time. Two stops apart is all that's necessary. As far as the number of shots, you need as many as the conditions require. One easy and fast way to do this is to set your camera to display out of gamut sections of your image (regions that are either too light or too dark to expose on the sensor) to blink on your viewing screen on the back of your camera. If you see the white regions blink, you need to take another shot at -4 EC (or -6 or more if needed), if the shadow regions are blinking, than you need to take an extra shot at +4 EC (or +6 or more if needed). Never use a flash and always set your camera to the lowest ISO your camera can do. (Typically ISO 100.) HDR images are particularly susceptible to accumulated noise which is why you need to use low ISO settings.

Do NOT make any adjustments to one of the proto-HDR images prior to processing through Photomatix. Take all necessary images as is, and then process. If you need to remove Uncle Harry or sensor dirt from your image, do that after HDR processing, not before.

There is no right or wrong with your results, like all art, some approaches appeal to some people while other approaches appeal to others. What is important is that you experiment and play with the settings to achieve what looks great to you.

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___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.