Does Photomatix convert photos to JPEGs? No, it DOES NOT

Another landscape photo taken in Dahab. Hope you like it!

Today I decided to write about common misconception. Many people believe that Photomatix Pro internally converts RAW images to JPEG files, so they suggest doing it manually. However, the truth is that Photomatix doesn't do such a thing. Here is a link to the Photomatix FAQs.
And here is the excerpt from it:

"Question: Is is true that Photomatix converts RAWs to JPEGs for internal processing?
Answer: No. Photomatix does not convert RAWs files to JPEG for internal processing, and never did it. It would not make sense to do this anyway, given that converting to JPEG would result in quality loss and moreover would add processing time.
When you load RAW files in Photomatix, the files are converted in linear space into an uncompressed image with 16 bits per color channel, i.e. 48 bits per pixel.
The only moment Photomatix converts to JPEG is when you want to save the image created by Photomatix and choose to save it as JPEG. This applies to a tonemapped or fused image created by Photomatix, and not to the original image you loaded."

So, I prefer to convert to TIFFs instead or sometimes I let Photomatix read the RAW directly.

Where was this photo taken:

Show large map