HDR photography has a certain reputation, that isn't nessecarly correct. When people think of HDR they invision a photo that looks over processed and cartoon like. Some HDR can look like this when it is tone mapped very aggressivly and many people perfer photos that look that way. However, I have found that most people prefer the more realistic HDR style. The reputation that HDR has received was likely caused by the 5 evils of HDR.
1. The infamous halo is the first evil. A halo is a white glow that appears along edges with high contrast. They are most commonly found around trees and buildings that pertrude into a birght sky. To avoid halos, you simply need to be less aggressive when tone mapping.
2. The second evil is ghosting. Ghosting is some cases can create some very cool shots, but when it is used incorrectly it is ugly! Ghosting is caused by objects moving while you take bracketed shots. It could be a tree limb blowing in the wind, or people walking on a crowded street. If it is possible, you should avoid moving objects, but sometimes its not possible. To avoid ghosting, you can use the "remove ghosting" feature that can be found in some HDR software. If that doesn't do the trick you will have to do some post-processing in photoshop. The best way to do this is to blend one of your bracketed shots into your tone mapped HDR photo.
3. The third evil is noise and muddy textures. This is when the fine details of an image become exagerated. I see this most often on interior walls that have texture. When this happens surfaces that are suppose to be smooth will look dark and will have noise artifacts. The best way to avoid this is to lower the settings in your tonemapping software that increases fine scale detail (microcontrast for instance). Another solution to reduce noise is to take more shots when you take your bracketed photos. Tone mapping software will take the best tones from each image which naturally reduces noise. The more photos you have the more tones the software will have to select from.
4. The fourth evil is lens flare. Lens flare is the haze the comes off a bright portion of the photo. The best way to prevent lens flare is to use use a lens hood. After the initial capture their is very little that you can do to resolve lens flare, since very few tone mappers have an option to control this. (Photospere and HDRgen do have an option to correct lens flare). To reduce the impact of lens flare, you can increase the contrast of your photo in Photoshop. This should hide most of your lens flare.
5. The fifth and final evil in HDR is tone reversal. This is caused by over cooking an image when tone mapping. Tone reversal is when parts of a photo that you would perceive to be dark look bright. It can also make areas that you would think are bright to look dark. This can cause your photo to look very bizarr. The best thing you can do to avoid this, is to be more conservative when tone mapping your HDR file. In Photomatix you can keep your strength setting low and your highlight smoothing high.
