Didn’t finish work till 22:30 so got back to boaty and, after some food, went outside to take some photos.

As this was purely an experiment I didn’t spend too much time getting the composition ‘just right’ or playing around too much with the exposure. Just fired off 6 shots, increasing the shutter speed every time (I really should have been knocking down the f-stop but what they hell).

Anyhoo, back on boaty I fired up qtpfsgui and loaded the images in. Once done, accepting the defaults, I entered the tone map dialogue to create the LDR output. Now there are 6 or 7 different algorithms to choose from and I ended up picking the mantiuk one.

Here is the result:

Looks ok, although not amazing.

So off to google to find some tutorials. There are quite a few around but this one caught my eye: HDR tutorial: how to create HDR photos with free Qtpfsgui and GIMP

This tutorial recommends using 2 different algorithms and combining the output using

Colours are a bit more vivid in that shot. Still some experimentation to be done but qtpfsgui definitely shows some potential. I just wish the software had a better name