HDR does to photography what Thomas Kinkade did to painting. The majority of what you see is over-saturated, poor examples of people not knowing how to use their equipment. I mean, c’mon, grass is NOT supposed to look like that. Don’t get me wrong, there are some really good HDR images. I think knowing how to use your camera in the same situation would have yielded a much better result.
I’m not going to show an HDR image with this post because I don’t want to hurt any particular persons feelings but you can check some out on Flickr.
Nailed it, sir! HDR indeed sucks, and big time. It’s true that maybe one in 100 HDRs looks good, but the way this is usually used reminds me of poor people’s desperate need to “live”, it’s just like listening in awe to loud music, like cool eye-hurting dressing, it’s become a great tool for the photo-masses to impress and be impressed. Duh.
Technically, working with gamma yields better results, nicer looking and more true to the original scene. Since setting gamma does little alteration to an image, this is the first tool I use on fixing images. Now, if HDR would be classified as ‘artistic’ effect, I wouldn’t mind it, but it’s one thing to watch pointillized [?] or oiled-up [:D] photos – which usually look great, and another to try to pass HDR as the recommended way a picture should look. At one point, I wondered whether it’s not all about reduced sensitivity to color (loud noisy photo i’d say), much like daltonism.
I can only hope that this is simply a trend, and like all fashion it will die young.