Enfuse looks solid. I'll check it out. Thank you.
Still curious about others' techniques / processes.
Hi,
I used to use Enfuse as well, but have since gravitated to
SNS-HDR Pro. This is a brilliant Windows application if you are looking for natural-looking images. Its only drawback is that it makes things look too easy. I often wonder, is that all I need to do? But after that, it also offers a ton of tweaking options, which is where one's creativity comes into play and the real-time screen updates make that process very easy.
The author was also working on a Mac version, but since I'm on a Windows platform I've not followed that development. Others have reported that it does run fine under Parallels or similar virtualizers on MacOS. Since SNS-HDR is (amazingly) a one-man operation, he tends to exceed the intended release dates (e.g. due to hospitalization at one time).
Since the release of version 2, which makes better use of GPU acceleration, the complex behind-the-scenes calculations have been sped up hugely.
There are still improvements that can be expected (e.g. improved anti-ghosting, CA correction, etc.), but if you start with reasonably well-controlled image capture sequences (e.g. I do not exceed 1 and 1/3rd stop intervals) and with good lenses the results are excellent. It can handle Raw-file image input, but I prefer to feed it with better quality (e.g. resolution/false color aliasing and moiré control) Raw conversions by CaptureOne to TIFFs, which I then feed to SNS-HDR. It then picks up the embedded colorspace profile and uses that for the final (halo-free) fused output. That also allows using tricks like different white balance for different exposure levels.
But that's just the technical part, creativity is the flipside of the coin. But the ease of achieving good results in post-processing, does allow to focus more on the capture part as well.
Cheers,
Bart