Photomatix Pro 4.1.2

PhotoMatix is a program that photographers can use to solve a perplexing problem.
The problem is shooting good photos where there is a wide variation in contrast within a scene. For example, in a situation where you want to take a photo of a tall building with the sun high up in the sky in the background and a shadow in the foreground, the problem is that there’s no way to set the camera’s exposure controls to expose all the regions in the scene properly in a single shot. In a situation like that, if you set your camera’s exposure controls to properly expose the building, the background will be washed out, but if you set the camera to expose the background properly, the building will be too dark, as will the foreground.

Merge of bracketed photos into HDR (High Dynamic Range)
› Option for automatic image alignment of hand-held shots. Two alignment methods are available, the “by matching features” method corrects for translation, rotation, scaling and perspective.
› Selective deghosting tool for effective removal of “ghosts” in dynamic scenes: users can select ghosted regions with a lasso tool, and change the preferred image taken for each selected region. An option for automatic reduction of ghosting artifacts is also available..
› Option for automatic reduction of chromatic aberrations.
› Option for automatic reduction of noise.
› Reading of exposure information from Exif data.
› Source images can be either 8 bits/channel or 16 bits/channel images, or RAW/DNG files. In the case of RAW files, White Balance and output color space can be adjusted.

HDR image adjustments with Tone Mapping and Exposure Fusion
› Two methods for Tone Mapping: Details Enhancer, based on a local operator, and Tone Compressor, based on a global operator.
› Four methods for Exposure Fusion: Highlights & Shadows – 2 images, Highlights & Shadows – Auto, Highlights & Shadows – Adjust, and Highlights & Shadows – Intensive
› Tone Mapping methods may be applied to single image.
› Dialog with preview for adjusting the following settings:
Details Enhancer: Strength, Color Saturation, Smoothing, Luminosity, Gamma, Black and White Point, Color Temperature, Saturation Highlights, Saturation Shadows, Microcontrast, Micro-smoothing, Highlights Smoothness, Shadows Smoothness and Shadows Clipping.
Tone Compressor: Brightness, Tonal Range Compression, Contrast Adaptation, Black and White Point, Color Temperature and Color Saturation.
Fusion/Adjust: Accentuation, Blending Point, Shadows, Saturation, Black and White Point, Midtones Adjustments.
Fusion/Intensive: Strength, Radius, Saturation.
› Settings can be saved as Presets for quick access, or saved to and loaded from XMP files
› 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.
› Loupe to get a crop at 100% resolution.
› Option for different preview ratios and magnification
› Undo and redo buttons for the settings done.
› Luminance and per color channel histogram.
› Output image is in 16 bits/channel mode, with the option to save it as 8 bits/channel jpeg or tiff, if desired
› ”360 degree image” option for equirectangular image set to be viewed in a 360 degree panorama viewer.
› Tone Mapping can be undone.

32-bit HDR image support
- HDR Viewer shows local 32-bit HDR image data at the appropriate exposure
- Display of HDR Histogram (logarithmic)
- Read and Write support for Radiance RGBE (.hdr), OpenEXR (.exr) and Floating Point TIFF. Read support for 32-bit PSD and PSB.
- Ability to batch tone map single HDR files in Radiance or OpenEXR file formats.
- Function to tone map large Radiance files while benefiting from a preview.

Automatic Batch Processing
- Automatically loads and processes images of the specified input location, and saves resulting images to the specified output location
- Works for HDR generation, Tone Mapping and exposure fusion
- Advanced selection options: automatic detection of bracketed photos and ability to process a sub-set of each bracketed set.
- Strip processing option to generate an HDR image from large TIFF files without exceeding available RAM.
- Ability to set the Exposure Value spacing for HDR image generation
- Processes all sets of bracketed images stored under a given folder (number of bracketed images in each set specified by user before running the batch)
- Ability to process all sub-folders of a given folder, combining all image files stored under each sub-folder
- Options for naming the the resulting image files.

General
- Support of the following image file formats: JPEG (read & write), TIFF 24-bit, 48-bit and Floating Point (read & write), Radiance RGBE (read & write), OpenEXR (read & write), PNG (Mac version: read & write), PSD (read only) RAW files (read only)
- Ability to tag saved image with keyword
- Viewing of tone mapping or fusion settings embedded in processed image.
- Option to customise default filename.
- Basic image operation tools › Cropping (also works with HDR images)
› Resizing (also works with HDR images)
› Rotating (also works with HDR images)
› Sharpening
› Brightness & Contrast
› Remapping of mirror ball (also works with HDR images)

Mac OS 10.4/10.5/10.6/10.7 - 32/64-bit Universal

Version 4.1.2:
Updated Raw conversion function, adding among others support of Raw files from Olympus E-PL3, Nikon P7100, and Sony A77 and A65.
Bug fixed: Using a function from the 'Utilities' menu on an 8 or 16-bit image made the image display with an incorrect color profile.