Open source High Dynamic Range photography in 2012

I haven't looked in detail at the "temperature" of the original images, but it looks like the results have different colour casts precisely because of various processing steps employed by the different toolchains. In any case, controlling the white balance precisely (or even at all) is likely to be awkward for some kinds of camera, so it can be informative to see how the tools manage if the settings vary across images.

Making HDR images is a difficult business. Most of the images one sees typically compress the widened range into such a narrow distribution that the result looks like a screenshot from some kind of primitively shaded first-person shooter. Even though the human visual system is able to handle bright and dark subjects much better than the average digital camera, people seem to overlook the fact that it generally doesn't do so all at once: you may be able to distinguish shadow detail in a bright scene by shifting your attention to that detail, but you aren't also having to resolve the details of bright clouds at the same time, and yet a HDR image is expected to do both and still look "natural".

It's not a comparison of the images; it's a comparison of the applications. Specifically their usability, since they are all capable of producing OpenEXR images (in which the white balance is scene-referred...).

Nate