I’ve been experimenting with RAW files recently. For the shot below, I used the NEX-7’s exposure bracketing to get three exposures. Then, using the brightest and darkest exposures, I adjusted the exposure compensation for each so that there were no clipped highlights for the dark exposure and very few clipped shadows for the bright exposure. There was a 4.5 stop difference between the two exposures I saved the results and fed those files into Luminance HDR using Fattal to do the tone mapping. I got an interesting result almost immediately. While I do wish the sky was a bit more muted, I do like how the foreground details turned out.
I got some reasonable looking results using Ashikhmin too.
And, finally, here is a quick edit where I blended the two layers together in GIMP:
