I just have to select the various exposures and run the plugin to get a merged result back in Lightroom, ready for further adjustment. The LR/Enfuse plugin simplifies running the merge from Lightroom. While Enfuse is open source and available for free, I've been using an Adobe Lightroom plugin that is sold as donationware, by Timothy Armes. The resulting merged image is then a great starting point for further adjustments. I've found that the defaults work well to merge a well exposed set of images. The algorithm can also automatically align images, if you haven't shot them all on a tripod.
There is some level of control for the user to provide masks, or bias it towards keeping contrast or saturation in the image. Instead of generating a merged, high dynamic range image with floating point pixel values, the enfuse algorithm picks out from across the various exposures what it considers to be the best exposed pixels for a particular region, then merges them all together. This is an open-source solution to the problem, that takes quite a different approach to blending the exposures.
I started looking for something similar for OS X and got a recommendation for Enfuse. I have managed to do some more realistic HDR images, using the Wukong beta/ Essential HDR product from Imaging Luminary but since I moved to a Mac, I haven't been able to use their software. While that is a perfectly valid thing to do, it just doesn't appeal to me that much. The saturation is often off the charts and the local contrast added by most tone mapping algorithms typically seems very heavy handed, for what I want to achieve. I've dabbled with HDR photography a bit in the past, but always felt the results were quite cartoonish.
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