Early Light on White Barn by Gary Hamburgh - All Rights Reserved
I have been using Photomatix Pro for several months to process HDR images. I have been very happy with the results for HDR but there is another option in the program that I had not tried until recently. Rather than generating an HDR and tone mapping, the other option is to create an image through exposure blending.
I tried this process and below is a comparison between the final images using HDR in the first image and exposure blending in the second.
Palouse Falls Canyon by Gary Hamburgh - All Rights Reserved
Palouse Falls Canyon by Gary Hamburgh - All Rights Reserved
In this example my preference is for the image that was processed with tone mapping as it tends to show more detail in the shadows. Some of you may prefer the exposure blending so It is nice that this program does allow for options for combining and processing images with high contrast elements.
The Palouse Guy 