There’s now a nice, interactive graphical interface for the “enfuse” exposure fusion tool. It’s called ImageFuser.
Exposure fusion has similar effects to creating an HDR image and tonemapping it, but it works directly from the series of normal images and creates another normal image — there’s no actual HDR image created at any point. Also the final image is created entirely using pixels from the original image series, so the effect is naturalistic — none of the surreal colors or funky halos that you get in some of the more exotic HDR jobs.
It’s got a built-in automagical image alignment tool too, so if your shots are slightly off it can shuffle them together for you.
I grabbed a stack of nine images I’d taken of the Indiana Repertory Theater in Indianapolis back in August… I used three of them, I think, 3 stops apart, to create this beastie via exposure fusion. I’d done an HDR of it before, and that was pretty sweet, but this is much more naturalistic looking.
While I’m at it, here’s a more recent, winter scene, of a snowy parking lot. This was 7 shots, 2 stops apart.
(apparently I happened to catch the Death Star in this shot, accidentally)
Anyway, ImageFuser kicks butt. The only thing I’d add to it would be a means of aligning the images by hand, for those occasions where the automatic alignment fails to do its thing right.