Digital Light & Color

No, the control points are customized to the tone ranges. Increasing the contrast of the highlights does necessarily decreased their average brightness however since white is fixed; similarly increasing contrast for shadows lightens them on average.

I have not used Photomatix, but the new Stack Images command is designed to automate the process of combining bracket exposures to produce a high dynamic range image. There is a white paper that describes this process in detail.

http://ftp2.bmtmicro.com/dlc/Stack_Images.pdf

There is no vibrancy feature in PWP. Vibrancy is not a technical term - what most people seem to mean is some combination of increased saturation and contrast.

Different color engine? Different handling of profiles on opening files? Different monitor profile?

Nothing has changed in the program that I can think of that would cause what you are seeing if the settings are actually all the same.

To get a good stitch you need to adjust the goemetry of the images - which depends on the lens focal lengths, remove barrel or pincushion distortion, adjust for light falloff, and tweak the registration.

Panoramic stitching software is often more convenient to use than PWP for combining multiple photos into one. This is a complex, specialized function that is best done with specialized software.

No, there is no way to change what the LCD displays. Profiling works by photographing a special target that contains patches of known colors. A profile is then generated that maps the observed colors to their correct values. The profile can then be used to correct subsequent photos. For digital came...

Many transformations in PWP have an Amount control which is used to blend the result of the transformation with the original input image. In addition to the slider which runs from 0% (the input image is simply copied to the output image) to 100%, you can also use this control to select a mask for th...

Currently the only transformation that uses multiple cores is bilateral sharpen. We are looking at supporting multiple cores across more transformations for future versions.

I would guess that applying the inverse monitor curves on the Adobe RGB file but using the printer profile as a proofing profile might work the best, but it might be worth experimenting.