Qtpfsgui has great tone-mapping and aligning facilities, allows 8,16 and 32 bit channels and two means of manually manipulating the image. Qtpfsgui creates a wonderful range of tone-mapped HDR images. When loaded, the images can be aligned either automatically and manually.
Click next and a wizard walks you through recommended profiles or you can change this to get the best profile for your image. It gives you choices for ghosting and response curves, and if these are not to your liking you can tick the custom configuration. After the generated image has been achieved, you have at your disposal a good array of tone-mapped filters and the ability to adjust tone-mapping manually. Here’s the big hint; if your computer is struggling create the image in the smallest size. After you adjust your levels and find that you are satisfied with the finished image, delete it (yes, that’s right, delete it!) and create your large one. This is not just Windows software; it can be used on Linux and Mac operating systems with support for RAW format.

Step one of the process is to select the images you wish to use as the basis for your HDR photograph; once loaded, it gives you the One of the infrared photos I used to make the HDR imageopportunity to adjust the images’ exposure values to more optimal settings, if you wish. Once this step is complete, the images must be aligned, a process you can allow the software to perform for you or choose to do by yourself. You are then taken to a “weighting and visualization” that allows you to adjust individual layers, apply an anti-ghosting mask, etc. Once this step is completed, you have an HDR image… but you’re not done yet. You need to carry out tone mapping in order to make the HDR image appear correctly on an LCD screen. This step gives you eight options, all based on methods developed in academia and named accordingly – at this point, experimentation is recommended in order to find the best results.
Overall Recommendation Rating Average

Overall, I consider my experience with this software average – it would have been better had the image alignment actually worked as desired, but the default option kept causing errors. As a result, the alignment was off in the final product, but it was close enough for me to get a feel for the results of my HDR experimentation (Please note that I got the image alignment to work under Windows XP, but could not use the same workaround in Vista). I can certainly recommend this free HDR software, but I would caution users to be ready to play around with it for a while in order to achieve the desired effect. For the price, it is certainly an excellent introduction to HDR photo editing but, in the long run, you may wish to choose another package if you decide to pursue HDR photography on a regular basis.