saw this on UnBeige and it was something i was not aware of:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/high-dynamic-range.htm

in a nutshell, you take a series of images bracketing the exposure of a single composition and photoshop CS2 will put them together in one seamless, perfectly exposed image. looks pretty schweet.

Yeah it can be pretty difficult to use in practice though.

Your bracketing needs to be enough that the high and low exposure are extreme. On most cameras this requires a manual exposure.

Pretty much has to be done on a tripod. (not usually a big deal)

32 bit files are huge, the filter won't even run on my computer without at least 5GB of HD space free and the resulting files are 300-400MB each. File sizes are 4 times the size of 16 bit files and 8 times the size of 8 bit files. So if you normally make a 10MB 8bit tif files then the 32 bit file would be 80MB.

For the most part you cannot output 32 bit files (or even see all the colours on your monitor) so you have to convert back to 16 bit.

That said it works well for images with high contrast (extreme shadow and highlights). I have used this technique for burnt trees on bright sun lit snow and water with strong sun reflections.

It should also work better for images that have a lot of the same tone (lots of red for example) by providing more bit depth in that colour.

www.luminous-landscape.com had an article about a year ago on this as well.

Very usefull information plus many more tutorials. Thanks Shecky!