Merging photos is CS2

I notice several people blend photographs in PS2 and they look nice. I have taken pics wihout moving the camera, not even a nitch, just adjust my exposure yet when I HD merge they never match up clean, is this common, am I doing something wrong?

I think that it is very common to have the problem you describe. I know that sometimes I have it and sometimes I don't. The problem is that a nitch is so terribly small a movement. The only thing I can suggest is to set your camera to an auto bracketing mode and use a cable release for the shutter (you shouldn't be touching your camera at all between exposures, and they should be coming fairly rapidly one after the other). If you already take precautions like these, you may want to look into a dedicated HDR program since some of these will make an effort to line up the images automatically for you.

I think it's misleading that Photoshop has HDR under "Automate" since it only automates part of the process which is merging the image data into a 32-bit file. The real work happens when you convert from 32-bit down to 16-bit. That's where you can tweak the histogram to adjust highlights, shadows, and overall contrast.

There's a very good article on it here

Guy

It could be that the HDR techinique is a little more sophisticated and I've not yet explored the possibilities, but I've had a little better luck with this digital blending technique. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

Dan, are you letting the camera do auto-bracketing or are you adjusting the bracketing between exposures. My experience has been that once you touch the camera, the pixels won't line up.

Thank you all for the help, I have applied some of the ideas in the articles as well as the simple PS process, they all help.
Tony, I had been adjusting exposure between shots. I did some reading up on bracketing this weekend as I had never tried it. Now that I understand how it works I will be in good shape. Thank you all for the help