Secondly, it looks like Photomatix (not Photomatrix) has come a long way since I last used it and after taking a glance at their website, I might have to revisit.

The dynamic range of many images is surprisingly wide and even if your sensor barely covers the range, it's often better to place critical detail further in from the extremes of the sensor's capabilities. It's still needed in many if not most cases if you're interested in the best results. I strongly disagree about the need to blend exposures with the latest wide dynamic range sensors. You should be able to evaluate, compare and decide if it's worth the investment to you, all without the need to buy a license. PM can be downloaded as a trial and is fully functional (I think) but places a watermark on your images. Between that an Capture One's excellent tools, I've had no need for PM for quite some time. LR, as of about version 6, introduced Photo Merge > HDR which will output a dng. I don't think PM is needed given the dynamic range of newer cameras and the capabilities of modern software, which does a good job of extracting detail from both highlights and shadows. I don't want strong HDR effects and I'd be using it for landscapes rather than real estate (which seems to be Photomatix primary market now). I've just checked and could upgrade Photomatix to the latest version for £19 which sounds reasonable.īut is it any better than photomerging in LR CC Classic? Or would I just be complicating my processing unnecessarily? I've done very few photo merges for the past five years anyway but have started exposure bracketing regularly again. I bought a licence for version 4 back in 2012 and used it for a couple of years for merging exposures but as LR and Windows upgraded and I didn't upgrade Photomatix is started to crash and I uninstalled it.

Photomatix pro 4 update