How do people prefer to make HDR?

[sam_rowlands]

I'm not trying to start a fight here, but what I'd like to see is some friendly banter where people can explain which method they use to create HDR's and why they like it.

Personally I prefer to use AEB with either 2 stops or if it's not enough 3 stops, leaving a single for when there's too much motion.

 

[Bynx]

This is a good thread Sam. There are numerous ways to make an HDR and each output varies from one way to the other and from one version of software to another. Case in point the old Photomatix and the newer version. The outcome is strikingly different. Im going through all the software and methods and coming up with the output from the same jpegs. Im curious to see what the differences are.

 

[ccarollo]

Personally, I think of HDR as a way to overcome the limitations of my camera. When I look at a scene, my eye can take in a substantially greater range of brightness than the CCD in my camera can. Though some look very nice, I'm not a huge fan of the really stylized HDR images -- I prefer images that look natural, as I see them.

I tend to use 3-4 shots bracketed so that the top and bottom won't be clipping whites or crushing blacks. Then I merge into a .hdr file and do the tonemapping in Lucidity, the tonemapping program I wrote (Photomatix is nice but tends to look more stylized than I like, and has too many dials for my tastes). From then back into Photoshop for some final leveling/saturation/sharpness/resizing adjustments.

Here's where I have my tonemapper, if anyone's interested in trying it out:
Lucidity