Exposure bracketing - Merging

[Peterj]

I'm not always pleased with the results when I use PhotoMerge Exposure in PSE.

I found a free offering from HRD labs - Picturenaut - which provides a bit more control especially for tonal adjustments. The final image produced probably will need further tweaks.

[BuckSkin]

I use both Picturenaut and Luminance; both are excellent FREE HDR programs.

Picturenaut is very easy to master and achieves good results.

Luminance is a bit more involved, but if I can learn it, anyone probably can; Luminance has an excellent alignment feature for hand-held images and has more bells and whistles than Picturenaut.

I often use Elements 7 to merge different tone-mapped results from either or both of the HDR programs, often merging the tone-mapped HDR images with one of the original images, using various opacities and blend modes.

I also use layer masks to select the best portions of the various tone-mapped image layers to achieve the result I am after.

Maybe the sky looks best in one image, while the foreground looks better in another, and so forth and so on.

And, remember, both programs are FREE !!!