I’ve been very impressed with the HDR work of Trey Ratcliff (www.stuckincustoms.com) and found the HDR effect in landscapes and cityscapes really added to the image for me personally. This technique is particularly useful if you have a situation where part of the image is very bright and another part is much darker such as a landscape in bright sunlight. I decided to experiment and see what I could do with the technique. Now to try this you first need a software that processes images to create this effect. The one Trey recommends is Photomatix. He provides a discount on his site but you can try it free. Anyway to show you what I did I have two images, the first is an image that had a decent exposure in camera that I processed in lightroom
The second image is a similar image using HDR….
In this case I used several images of varying exposure from way underexposed to way overexposed and processed them through Photomatix. As you can see, the sky is a little less washed out and the trees and grass seem to pop more. I personally like the look of HDR for landscape and cityscape pictures or even the inside of large inside spaces. As a result of the experiments today I decided to purchase photomatix and plan to use it for these sorts of images in the future.
Trey has dozens of his images as well as info and tutorials on his site. He is a master of HDR photography and his images, from all over the world, are amazing.