I've been intrigued by HDR photography for several months now. In fact, I've started manually bracketing several of my shots just so I could try my hand at HDR when I was ready. In layman's terms, HDR photography involves combining several images taken at different exposures into a single image. By combining the separate images, you are able to create a final image that has a greater dynamic range than a single digital image capture could ever contain. You can read more about HDR here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging.

Because I don't own Photoshop, I was at a bit of a loss on where to start with HDR. So instead of trying to manually pin and merge the images using Photoshop Elements, I decided to investigate several commercially available HDR software packages.

Using the default application settings and stubbornly refusing to read more documentation than absolutely necessary, I tested three different packages: FDR Tools, Dynamic Photo HDR, and PhotoMatix Pro. The point of this post is not to describe the workings of each, but rather to show the source image files and the output each application created for a beginning user.

The first eight images are the source images - the bracketed shots I took that go from properly exposed for the sky to properly exposed for the hills and trees in the foreground.

The final three shots show the output of each program, in order. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on which look you prefer. I think my eye is drawn to the PhotoMatix treatment.