I just discovered how to do this tonight. I couldn't be happier. This makes quick processing much, much better(at least in my mind) and faster. I just made a quick HDR from a single jpg.

Original:


Tonemapped:

Assplain?

Like you're shooting JPEG and RAW? Or can the Pentax convert a RAW to JPEG in camera AFTER you shoot it?
Nice shot, but I don't think the tone mapping is necessary. You could have gotten the same results with regular PP IMHO. You didn't go too far, it just wasn't necessary is all.

I agree the tonemapping doesn't seem to have done anything for the image, in fact the yellow on the plane is oversaturated IMO.

You can't really convert an 8 bit JPG in to an HDR image, it goes against the definition of HDR, but as you noticed you can tonemap it. Unless people are misusing the meaning of HDR these days too (wouldn't surprise me ).

In CS3 you can go to Edit -> Preferences -> and select to open Camera RAW with jpegs.... It seems to allow me to edit the pictures much better.



But.... I know hardly anything at all about Photoshop. Hell, I don't even know how to do layers.

oh, yeah, OK, now I see what you're saying.
It is very fun to play with, but for some reason I prefer doing each adjustment as a step. When I get that one window with all those adjustments it's very hard for me to make critical adjustments... So I "go easy" the touch up in PS with the usual stuff.... But what's the point unless I remove those steps in my workflow?

It's great for batches though. Better than actions IMHO.