Free HDR software that is worth the effort

I really have not done a lot in the way of HDR, and Photoshop CS5's HDR really screws things up more than it enhances it. I wind up having to do post processing on the HDR post processing, which seems self defeating

Are there any free HDR programs out there that are worth the effort? I use it so little I honestly can't see spending any money on a program

TKS

SM

Photomatix is awesome, and only $99, so even if you just dabble with it, it's not going to break the bank. Well worth it in my opinion.

As for the freebies, I can't really suggest any good ones. Oloneo used to be free when it was still beta, but I just checked and they're charging for it now. I've heard good things about EasyHDR, but haven't tried it myself. The downside of the freebies is that most of them aren't fully functional, or they put a watermark on your images.

Check out Picturenaut, it used to be free and worked pretty well with multiple exosures. I used it until I purchased some but it worked pretty well.

Download

I use the cheap version of photomatix ($39) and it works great!

I used luminance and found it to be very good.

sailtastic said:

I used luminance and found it to be very good.

Click to expand...

I am just about to install that right now.

I used to use Luminance, but it crashes too much any more (even after reinstalling), and won't let me create full-size (6016x4016) HDRs. I switched to Picturenaut because it doesn't have that size limit, plus I'm able to save the result as a 16-bit TIF (Luminance only does JPEG outputs, 8-bit editing sucks!).