Download Photomatix – Free Trial
If you decide to purchase a license for any Photomatix product, you will get an automatic 15% discount by entering the coupon code photoluminary on the order form at HDRsoft.com.
It is possible to download Photomatix free of charge, as a trial version from HDRsoft.com. The trial versions of all Photomatix products are fully functional and never expire. The do however leave watermarks on saved images. With the purchase of a Photomatix Pro license, watermarks on previously saved images can be removed by running the images through the software. However, this will only work if the watermarked images have received no post-processing either within Photomatix, or within another photo editing program such as Photoshop.
Here are instructions for removing the watermarks, which are found on the HDRsoft.com website.
Here are the download links for all of the various Photomatix versions:
Photomatix Pro (includes a free Lightroom Export Plug-In):
Photomatix Essentials:
Aperture Plug-In:
Photoshop Tone Mapping Plug-In:
If you are new to digital photography I would personally suggest downloading the free trial version of Photomatix Light first. If you decide to then purchase a license for the Light version of the software, you can always later upgrade your license to Photomatix Pro for the US$60 price difference. There is no need to pay full price for Photomatix Pro if you already own a license for Photomatix Light. Also, if you do later upgrade from Light to Pro, you would be entitled to use both versions if you would like.
Most people choose to purchase a license for either Photomatix Pro or for the Pro Plus Bundle. The purchase of a license for the Pro Plus bundle basically entitles you to use all of the various Photomatix versions. So, you would be entitled to use Photomatix Pro (includes Lightroom Export Plug-In), the Photoshop Tone Mapping Plug-In, the Aperture Plug-In, and Photomatix Light if you wish.
The newest version of Photomatix Pro, which came out on 10/28/2010, has some very useful new features. For instance, in older versions there was no way to apply deghosting to specific regions on an image. Now, in version 4 this is possible.
Also, it is now possible to use noise reduction on the source images, whereas in older versions noise reduction was only applied to the merged 32-bit image. Removing the noise on source images prior to merging them is more desirable.
Another helpful feature new to Photomatix Pro version 4 is the preset thumbnail panel. In older versions, the only way to view results from either a preinstalled preset or a user created preset was to apply it to the image and wait for it to update. If you didn’t like the result, you then had to choose another preset or start twiddling with the settings. Now, you can view small thumbnail results from both preinstalled and user created presets, which appear in a panel. the panel can be toggled either vertically or horizontally in the “Preferences” menu.
Please see my comprehensive HDR tutorial!
