Trendy photographic technique HDR has been getting a bad press lately, largely because people seem to think that garish overdone images are really cool, when they’re actually not most of the time. Nice then to see this set of tips on how to do HDR photography properly, which will help you create beautiful images using the technique.
The problem with HDR is that by default, it looks artificial and ugly, and it takes some work to bring it back to something believable. Though knowing how to achieve that result mostly comes with practice, there is one important trick that I should mention here: you should never try to obtain the final look of an image in the tone mapping phase, and instead just focus on bringing all the details back from shadows and highlights. You should aim for a low contrast (especially local contrast), low saturation image at this stage, and only afterward, in Photoshop and with local curves adjustments, bring back the full glory of the scene.