I realized that I haven’t updated my Photomatix Pro software in a while so I went over to HDRSoft’s website to see what the latest version was. I found that I was many versions out of date… and one of the updates that I had missed has some major upgrades in it!  As of today, the latest version out is 3.2.3. Check your software install to see if you’ve got this version and if you don’t I highly recommend you downloading it… especially if you are like me and had a pre-3.2 version installed.

Version 3.2 of Photomatix released on July 13th, 2009 has some amazingly huge new features in it. Here are some of the main ones that you are missing out on if you don’t have version 3.2 or higher…

• Multi-threaded support for Tone Compressor and parts of Details Enhancer. Most computers come with a dual-core processor these days and now Photomatix will take advantage of both cores. This means much faster processing times!
• Improvements to the details enhancer that offers finer control for Smoothing settings (the setting that controls the natural vs artificial look) and improved effect of Highlights Smoothness (the settings that preserves clean skies).
• Ability to tag saved images with IPTC keywords.
• More robust alignment for “by matching features” method.
• Batch processing advanced options: automatic detection of bracketed photos and ability to process a sub-set of each bracketed set.
• Improved accuracy of the Tone Mapping preview compared to the final image. This was one of my biggest complaints that the final image didn’t always turn out like the way it looked on the screen. So this is an excellent fix in my opinion!

There are a lot of other items on the list for version 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, and 3.2.3 so make sure to upgrade if you haven’t already.