The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

For what it's worth, pfstools is sponsored by the Max Planck Institute, who've done lots of HDRI-related research and presented many times at SIGGRAPH and Eurographics. pfstmo, specifically, is maintained by Grzegorz Krawczyk of MPI. The pfstmo homepage explains exactly which tone-mapping algorithms it implements, along with a convenient URL that provides more information about each technique

If you'd like to get a feel for what pfstmo's operators can produce, there's a comparative gallery here:

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/tmo/NewExperiment/TmoOverview.html

As far as I can tell, all of the operators that produced those images are available in pfstmo, except for Greg Ward's, which is probably available in the Radiance package (free for non-commercial use), if not in pfstmo. The gallery also links to a short paper which describes the parameters used to produce the images.

As for recommending pfstools to photographers, I guess that depends on whether they're comfortable with command-line tools and possibly building their own packages (pfstools is not available in MacPorts, for example). If they are, then the availability of high-quality gratis tools is always a good thing, right?

Kudos to MPI for making both their HDR research and their code freely available, by the way. It's a great set of resources for people interested in HDRI.