I’ve heard it said a number of times, but I just don’t understand it. Why would you do this? What I’m referring to is converting your images to jpegs before processing them for HDR in Photomatix. I’ve had a number of people tell me that you should convert to jpegs prior to merging to HDR in Photomatix because you’ll get a better result and because the software converts to jpeg before processing anyway! Let me tell you here and now – this is hogwash!! The answer is “NO”! You should not convert from RAW or Tiffs to jpegs prior to processing the HDR, regardless of what you may have read or been told, you should not do this!

In a recent conversation with an individual from Canada I was told I should try the above because that is what “Trey Ratcliff” recommends and he has been doing HDR for years, therefore he should know what he is talking about. My response was simply “that doesn’t make sense. Why would you ever convert to a format that throws away a significant amount of data before making use of the data? I’ve always used the Tiff file format and have gotten great results in my HDR images (see the image above).”

Well my friend from Canada posed the question to the makers of Photomatix (HDRSoft) and received a definitive answer from Geraldine of the Photomatix Engineering Team that should put an end to this nonsense:

“Photomatix does NOT convert the images you are importing to JPEG for internal processing, and never did it. It would not make any sense to do this…

However, converting TIFF files to JPEGs in Photoshop before processing in Photomatix is a bad idea, given the loss of quality due to the conversion to JPEG.”

Please take note of that last sentence again “converting TIFF files to JPEGs in Photoshop before processing in Photomatix is a BAD (emphasis added) idea…”.

Thanks Geraldine!

If you shot your image sequence as jpeg files, then you should process them as jpeg files because you’ve already thrown away 1/3 to 1/2 of the available data by shooting in jpeg format. However, if you shot your image sequence in RAW or Tiff, then it is recommended that you process the HDR sequence as a series of Tiff files. Why not RAW files, please refer to the link above for information on RAW processing in photomatix. In short, yes you can and Photomatix does support it, however you might get better results if you convert the RAW files to Tiffs using Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, or other more sophisticated RAW processor.

With that said, I would ask that you share this post with everyone you know – tweet it, retweet it, share it on facebook, and any other social media site you might participate in, and let’s put an end to the myth that “you should convert to jpegs prior to HDR processing”!