I've been getting ready for my appearance on a panel at the upcoming Standord Symposium on High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography by gathering some test images and experimenting with various HDR workflows. One tool I'm using is particularly interesting...PhotoAcute has as its major claim to fame the ability to increase the apparent resolution of an image by using several frames of the same scene and processing them into a double-resolution image. I'll be writing more about that later, but today I was using their excellent image alignment and blending technology to "pre-process" my HDR images before passing them on to Photomatix Pro and then into Photoshop.
For comparison I processed the sames series of 9 images (ranging from -4 to +4 f-Stops) taken with my D700 in Photoshop using Auto-Blend, in PhotoMatixPro using the Natural Preset and in PhotoAcute and then PhotoMatixPro using Natural. The one using PhotoAcute was sharper and more lifelike. I'm not sure whether the differences will come through but I've reproduced previews of them below. For my final image I used a different set of Tone Mapping settings to create a more "artsy" look (for which PM has quite a reputation), but the natural images also were an excellent starting point for working in Photoshop.
I'll be writing more about how I'm processing my HDR images including some more details on how I achieve the final results, but in addition to looking at the very powerful tool PhotoMatix Pro if you haven't already you might want to look at PhotoAcute.