King of the hill is PTGui and its only real former competitor, AutoPano, is now abandonware. Source: about 2 years ago

A full-featured stitching utility like PTGui - If you are going to be doing any amount of extensive stitching, you are going to be using a dedicated stitching utility like PTGui. Let's say you shoot a 3-frame pano, and you have a parallax problem in the overlap between frames 1 and 2. You just go in with PtGui, and mask the area say in frame 1, so that PTGui will use that designated area from frame 2 for the... Source: about 2 years ago

For my own site I use PTGui Pro. It's not made for Wordpress, but I developed a workflow that works for me... And any solid Wordpress/PHP developer should be able to do the same for a Wordpress site. Source: over 2 years ago

PTGui is probably the best panostitching software package, but it's not for casual users who occasionally stitch as a personal-use license is about US$159 and a PTGui Pro license is $317. Can, like most full-featured spherical pano stitchers, do panostitching and HDR or exposure fusion at the same time. Source: almost 3 years ago

PTGui is the best app for pano stitching, with excellent HDR tools: https://ptgui.com/. Source: almost 3 years ago

If you're looking for a free alternative, you can try LuminanceHDR and HDRMerge, both open source. I've never tried either of them, just found them here: https://pixls.us/software/. Source: over 1 year ago

I've tried merging exposure-bracketed photos with various HDR utilities, including directly in Darktable. To be honest, the only thing I've ever got decent results out of is HDRMerge. My preference is to do the merge from the command-line interface (I have it scripted up as part of my automated workflow) but it has a GUI as well if you prefer. Source: over 3 years ago

For HRD merge I tried https://jcelaya.github.io/hdrmerge/ a couple of times, I think it does the correct thing ; it just merges and produce a file with larger dynamic range and let the tone mapping for you. The /r/shittyHDR look comes mostly from bad tone mapping. I rarely use exposure bracketing because I can directly average shots on my Canon camera. Source: over 3 years ago

I'm not aware of any automated way to do it in the Gimp. I use HDRMerge to combine multiple shots at different exposures into a single HDR image for later processing in the Gimp and it gives me pretty good results. It can be run as a batch-job, which makes it very easy to slip into an automated workflow. Source: over 3 years ago

I've tried creating HDR images with a variety of programs, including Darktable, but the only one I've ever had good results with has been HdrMerge. Source: over 3 years ago