I have been experimentng with HDR for the past couple of months and feel I am still on the steep up-slope of the learning curve. I have tried Photomatrix but found it a little unreliable with regards to alignment on ocassions, I also found it caused haloing, nothing that could not be fixed manually in PSE5, I am currently doing all my merging and blending manually as I prefer the results. (I too found CS3 a little on the Rubbish side of good for HDR - only had the 30 day trial and could not justify the cost for what it gives over PSE5)
My biggest problem in getting HDR to work has been movement in the scene, water and trees mostly. I am now using a hybrid method of taking multiple exposures in RAW, then using one or more of these raw images to generate TIFF files at different exposures and then adding these to the original files for merging, typically:
Take 3 raw exposures, spot metered off the Sky, forground and shaddows, open these files and adjust to over and under expose so that I end up with 9 TIFF images. I then choose which images to merge, possibly all, possibly 3 or 4, when movement is present in the shot, such as trees blowing around in the wind, I use the 3 TIFF's from a single RAW file for that part of the image so that the blurring is eliminated, or at least cut down to a minimum.
I prefer to spot meter for exposure rather than use bracketed exposures as I feel I have more control that way. I find myself being rather heavy handed with the processing at present and ending up with images that look interesting rather than natural, I'm sure this will improve with practice.
The most useful bit of kit I have found for this type of shooting is my notepad and pencil, so that I can make notes of what I'm doing out in the field for when I get around to processing.
As I said above, I'm still learning and welcome any comments / hints.
Great Thread!
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