Most of what I've seen of HDR pcitures is the sky and foreground have the same intensity making it look unnatural. Which program would have something like a slider that would allow you to change the relative brightness between the sky and foreground along a continuum of 0-100% so you can pick the point where you think it's most natural?
Hi Alan,
It depends a bit on the basic philosophy of the program, and the tools that are used to reduce contrast. Basically there are 2 methods of contrast adjustment, global tonemapping and local tonemapping. The problem you mention is usually caused by the global tonemapping part of the method. The more successful 'realistic' methods allow to have a certain level of control over the local tonemapping.
That also explains why the exposure fusion approach can deliver such normal looking results, it mainly addresses the local (actually per pixel) contrast, and the better inplementations allow to reduce the global contrast by excluding those low frequency changes from the fusion process.
What I personally like about SNS-HDR is that it also addresses the challenge with an approach based on photographically relevant parameters such as shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, and they can be tweaked more-or-less individually. It cannot fully separate the zones because everything is related to something else in some way, but the ephasis can be placed where needed. The midtone contrast slider in SNS-HDR, if pushed too far, does what you dislike, so when used with restraint, things should be fine.
Cheers,
Bart