I’ve played around with HDR before. Both in Photoshop and with Photomatix. The usual way is to take three shots at different exposures and then use the app to combine them into a tonemapped image. The problem is, that without a tripod, it’s really tricky to keep the camera still for all three shots. The program will do what it can to line the shots up, but they are never perfect.
What would be better would be to use a single RAW file and create the three under, normal and over exposed images. In photoshop you can do this with camera raw and then combine those three images into an HDR file.
Photomatix has a SINGLE SHOT option which does it for you. So I tried that today. The shot on the left is the regularly exposed image and the one on the right is the HDR Image created from it. Not too shabby. Maybe not as good as a real bracketted shot, but hard to tell unless you were to compare the two.
Just another option for creating HDRI after the fact (when you didn’t think about it at the time of taking the photo).
