Just found out about
Qtpfsgui. I had some previous struggles with HDR images but the tone mapping I was able to get by local adaptation wasn't quite what I wanted and it took a lot of work (see my
previous post for some more samples). Following (more or less) the tutorial from
garmahis.com I managed to get some really dramatic images (Fattal algorithm is really striking). When it comes to High Dynamic Range images you can get better results with
Gimp and
Qtpfsgui (open source tools) than with Adobe Photoshop or Photomatix (the Adobe image aligning algorithm is quite good and even the HDR creation seems better that Qtpfsgui's but it lacks "dramatic" tone-mapping algorithms). There's a long way to go into HDR imaging, but here is a comparison between my previous tone-mapped images (on the left) and the ones generated with Qtpfsgui (with minor tweaks and some layer blending).