Anyway to test it out I took a single fairly ordinary RAW image (Nikon NEF) that I had taken at the weekend, and tried to create an HDR image to see what difference this would make.

The image is of a sea wall at St.Margarets at Cliffe, near Dover, Kent, England. I took the photo on my way back from shooting a panorama, simply because there were three white rocks in a line, no real attempts at composition or anything (it had started raining and I wanted to get back to the car!). Here is the original JPG copy of the image straight from the camera (resized in Photoshop):

Using Dynamic-Photo HDR software, I imported the NEF version of the file, selected the ‘eye-catching’ mode, adjusted the tone mapping and here is the result:

5 minutes work has certainly made for a more dramatic image. Certainly oversaturated, the white stones have turned gray, I clearly need to do some finetuning, but it does give an indication of what is possible.

An improvement? I’ll leave that for others to decide!