I have yet to find an exposure blending technique that produces consistent results. I prefer not to use one that requires you to "paint" with a brush the areas that you want to blend because I find it too tedious and time consuming. That leaves luminosity mask blends and I've yet to master that technique.
What techniques are you using to blend multiple exposures? Please feel free to reference any tutorials, free or otherwise.
Hi Bret,
I like to avoid too much manual intervention, because it is too slow, and that hinders my creativity. I usually know where I want to have the image end-up, but the tedious steps of getting there take too much time.
That, and a huge dislike of halo defects and other distractions, and a huge preference for natural looking lighting, nudged me towards
SNS-HDR Pro over the years of trying different things (including Enfuse, which is a great step in the right direction). It allows to solve virtually impossible lighting scenarios, including natural looking High Dynamic Range scenes. I love natural light, but it doesn't always make rendering it easy. I now rarely need to do local adjustments anymore.
It's a Windows only program, but apparently it runs fine under Parallels, or similar, on a Mac.
There hasn't been much recent development released, not that it would need much but some is already announced (ghosting control, noise control, speedups by using the GPUs more, memory management), but that is apparently also caused by a delay that the programmer inflicted upon himself. He tried to make it a Multi Platform application, but that proved more difficult than he initially thought. Next update (Version 2.0) is expected in the October/November timeframe, and is supposed to be free for existing users).
The great benefit of the program is its resistance to halos and posterization (if brackets are not too wide), but even on single exposure images it can do magic. The virtually instant screen updates makes working with the sliders a joy, and really helps creativity.
Cheers,
Bart