Photomatix Pro is HDR photo software for Windows and macOS that combines photographs of the same scene taken at different exposures. It brings shadow and highlight information from those frames into one image, with controls for both restrained photographic rendering and more pronounced detail effects. Landscapes and interiors with bright windows are among its uses. Photomatix Pro can also adjust a single photograph, although that does not supply the exposure range captured by a bracketed set.
How Photomatix Pro merges bracketed exposures
A bracketed set supplies darker frames that retain bright areas and lighter frames that show shadow detail. Photomatix Pro sorts the photographs using exposure metadata or relative brightness, lets you exclude unwanted frames, and provides a coverage check for the selected exposures. Missing or incorrect exposure values can be adjusted before the merge.
Automatic alignment compensates for camera movement between shots. Tripod and handheld presets set the alignment approach, while perspective correction and a maximum-shift control allow further adjustment. Cropping the aligned result removes the uneven borders that this repositioning can leave.
RAW processing includes white balance, noise reduction, correction of color fringes and lens correction when a matching lens profile is available. Noise reduction can be limited to the darker exposures. For interiors lit by daylight and artificial light, separate white balance settings can be applied to brighter and darker source photographs before they are combined.
Ghost removal
Objects that move between exposures can appear in several positions after merging. Photomatix Pro provides automatic deghosting with an adjustable detection strength and a selectable base photograph for the affected areas. Stronger detection can introduce artifacts, making selective correction useful when movement is confined to particular objects.
The selective tool lets you draw around a moving area and choose which source exposure supplies that region. Different regions can use different photographs, so correcting a person need not force the same exposure onto moving foliage elsewhere. These selections can be saved as a ghosting mask and reused, including during batch processing. Deghosting works with the tone-mapping methods and Fusion/Natural; the other exposure-fusion methods do not use it.
Tone mapping
Preset thumbnails show different treatments of the merged photograph, including realistic, artistic, architectural and black-and-white styles. Selecting one changes the preview, after which the underlying controls remain adjustable. Photomatix Pro can save those settings as an XMP preset for another image, and split view compares the treatment with the original exposure.
Details Enhancer combines controls for tone compression, detail contrast and lighting. Tone compression brings shadows and highlights closer together, while highlight smoothing reduces enhancement around bright areas. Tone Balancer separates shadow lighting from fine-detail contrast, allowing changes to darker areas without relying solely on a global brightness adjustment.
Exposure fusion
Exposure fusion instead controls the contribution of the source photographs. In Fusion/Natural, Exposure Balance shifts the result toward the brighter or darker frames. Fusion/Interior provides separate highlight and shadow controls, along with local contrast and highlight depth. A single RAW file can also be split into lighter and darker versions for fusion, using information already present in that file.
Local adjustments and exposure blending
Color settings adjust saturation, brightness and overall temperature, or target an individual color’s hue. Brush and lasso selections confine these changes to particular parts of the photograph. Separate selections can carry different adjustments, with edge softness controlling the transition and edge detection helping the brush stay within boundaries.
Photomatix Pro also blends an unadjusted source exposure back into a selected area. You choose the photograph and its opacity, allowing a window or sky, for example, to receive a different balance from the surrounding HDR treatment. With a single-image input, the blending source is the original photograph. Local selections belong to the current HDR method and are discarded when that method changes.
Batch processing and output formats
The bracketed-photo batch tool groups files by a chosen frame count or detects sets from metadata. It can process subfolders, apply alignment and noise-reduction options, and produce results using one preset or several treatments per set. Individual Settings with Preview lets you choose different settings for each set before processing the whole batch. A separate single-photo batch mode applies tone mapping to individual files.
Naming, resizing and output-format options handle repeated delivery tasks. Individual photographs can also be cropped, straightened, sharpened and given a final contrast adjustment before saving. JPEG output suits finished images, while 16-bit TIFF retains more editing latitude. Saving an unprocessed 32-bit HDR image in formats such as OpenEXR or Radiance allows later tone adjustment without merging again; exposure fusion still needs the source photographs.
Plugins, editions and trial
Export plugins connect Photomatix Pro with Lightroom Classic and Capture One, sending photographs out for HDR processing and returning the saved result. The separate HDR Batch Plugin for Lightroom and Tone Mapping Plugin for Photoshop are included in Photomatix Bundle rather than the standard Pro purchase.
Compared with Photomatix Essentials, Pro adds selective ghost removal, local brush adjustments, source-exposure blending and batch tools. Photomatix Pro uses a perpetual paid license. Its trial has no expiry, but adds a watermark to created images.
