I like both the realistic and the unreal.  Someday I'd like to have a room with a huge lightbox where I can pull down a variety of wonderful scenery (of course, once I'm a multi-millionaire, I'll substitute a 100+" 4Q flatscreen for the lightbox and send images from a PC). 
 
For those old enough (many of us unfortunately  ), it would be like that mural wallpaper from the 70's but with light behind it to make it FAR more realistic.

For example, if we are looking at someone who is stood with the sun behind them, our eyes and brains are very good at correctly seeing both the bright sky/clouds behind them, and the details of their face and clothes that are in deep shade. Without maybe adding a neutral density filter to darken the sky, or using fill-in flash to brighten the subject, the camera is completely useless at capturing everything in the scene at the correct exposure.

 
Maybe it's just me but whenever I stand looking with the sun in front of me, afterwards all I see is spots.

Hi,
 
I think Photoshop is about to take a hike. Never liked it anyway.
 
This one looks more like a proper tool for a photographer that allows for proper/decent color corrections and trickery that only photographers that do labe work would be aware of.
 
Very nice stuff and yeah ... I have a program that I think I want!

rsp@odyssey.net
Awesome work Steve. Once again you have cost me money happily spent. I'm taking a 2 week solo drive through the heartland this summer and following the Mississippi River north from St. Louis to the Canadien border and I'll be shooting lots of landscape stuff. This bit of kit will be loads of fun to play with when I get home.

Randy

Thanks Randy
 
If you're interested, I came across this HDR tutorial which covers all the basics:
 

 
 
If you want to spend even more cash ($149 to be precise), I can heartily recommend the Google Nik Collection. It's a suite of seven awesome effects that you use as a plug-in inside Photoshop or Lightroom. One of the modules is an HDR processor - HDR Efex Pro - which works in a similar way to Photomatix.
 
Another excellent piece of software is onOne Perfect Effects 8. This works as a standalone program, and also as a plug-in with Photoshop or Lightroom. The good news here is that Perfect Effects 8 is a freebie - it's the 'tempter' they use to try and get you to buy their main product Perfect Photo Suite 8.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
I've submitted some of these pics to the Photmatix website, and they said they might display some of them in their gallery
 
I have to say I am rather chuffed

Dumb question.... but, isn't that like Melodyne Editor, for photography?
 
 
 
Regardless.... cool pics.
 

Wood67
Nice work Steve.  I've tried a few of these tools, but tend to either use a graduated ND filter, a fill-in flash for foreground and/or blend the layers by hand if bracketing.  Do you find the auto tools significantly better/quicker?  Where you have a reasonably clear transition point between sky/ground a pre or post filter can work pretty well provided the original exposure is a tad underexposed.

Hi Chris
 
I've often used Cokin ND grads before, but my concern is that using them makes it very difficult to achieve a 'natural' look. Sometimes I reckon you're better off not trying to create a balanced scene, but go all out and use the darkening the sky as an effect for its own sake.
 
Plus if you just want to lower the exposure on the sky, this can be done quickly and with much greater control using software. The graduated filter in Lightroom is really good, and as it's all in the software, you can assign whatever the filter does to variables other than exposure.
 
But although the results are pretty good, especially if you use the Lightroom grad on the first generation RAW to digital negative (DNG) file, I much prefer using HDR to create a level exposure across the image. And taking advantage of the wider exposure latitude of Camera RAW files means you can actually use a single photograph to create an HDR image instead of multiple exposures.
 
By way of a quick example, here's an original RAW (Canon .CR2 file) capture rendered to .jpeg in Lightroom. As I exposed this image for the sky, the foreground is pretty much a silhouette:
 

 
 
Here I processed the image in Lightroom by adding a graduated (exposure) filter to the top bringing the exposure down by around 2½ stops, and then another grad to the bottom adding in an extra 2 stops to bring out the detail:
 

 
 
Using the original (single) RAW image with Photomatix is pretty simple, and works well in Lightroom. I just made two copies of the file and then adjusted the overall exposure of each to mimic the effect of shooting three bracketed shots - I left one as shot, added 2 stops to one and darkened the other by around 2 stops.
 
I then processed the three clones in Photomatix and did a quick fiddle around in Nik Effects:
 

 
All in all, a much more satisfactory result I'd venture.
 
 

Guitarhacker
Dumb question.... but, isn't that like Melodyne Editor, for photography?
 
 
 
Regardless.... cool pics.
 

Thanks Herb.
 
Comparing Photomatix to Melodyne is maybe a little off-mark, in as much as you don't really use it to 'correct' anything that's been incorrectly captured. To use your DAW software analogy, I'd compare Photomatix to a compressor, but instead of levelling out volume differences, it levels out exposure differences.
 
And thanks to everyone else for the kind words and encouragement