In the mid-2000s, HDR was all about jacking up local contrast, giving you that unique look of gritty skin and halos cropping up all over the place. I'm talking stuff like this:
Less obnoxious tone mapping that compresses shadows and highlights is a more modern trend, I'd say post-2012. It's basically done by every cell phone today when shooting a high-contrast scene.
At the time, I produced some top ranked HDRs out of annoyance, like, oh, use tone map plugin? Automatic upvotes! Called it the "Flickr craze" and polled on comparison between:
I thought those types of shots were "woah, cool!" when I first saw them. But they got old and overused fast. I'm so glad those days are (mostly) behind us. It's interesting to me how that came and went as a photography "fad" in less than a decade.
https://digital-photography-school.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
Less obnoxious tone mapping that compresses shadows and highlights is a more modern trend, I'd say post-2012. It's basically done by every cell phone today when shooting a high-contrast scene.