Your excellent blog inspired me to share my fake HDR procedure:

I use the “Fake HDR Effect adaptive” and “Fake HDR Effect enhance” scripts found here:
http://registry.gimp.org/node/12023

Both of the scripts as such are quite useless, or maybe I just can't use them. Fake HDR adaptive gives a grazy contrast pop. Fake HDR enhance in turn results a grazy saturation/color pop.
I use the scripts with following procedure:

1. Open the original picture and if needed, tune it with levels, curves, duplicate overlay/screen layers or whatever method you prefer.
2. Duplicate the original picture (Ctrl-D)
3. Run Fake HDR adaptive for the duplicate (default settings); copy the result and put it as a layer above the original picture
4. Reset/undo the duplicate to its original state; now run Fake HDR enhance for it (default settings); copy the result and paste it as the topmost layer in the original picture. The duplicate picture is not needed after this step.
5. Now you should have three layers in the original picture: Fake HDR enhace layer at top, Fake HDR adaptive layer in the middle and the original picture at the bottom layer.
6. Change top layer mode to saturation and tune opacity down to taste (usually 10-40 is enough for me).
7. Middle layer might work best as normal, overlay, hard light, soft light or even screen; give it a try. In any case, opacity should usually be considerably less than 100.
8. Basically, that's it. You can also try to add more adaptive/enhance layers with screen/overlay/etc. modes. Try also using grayscale copy (inverted or straight) of layer as a layer mask for the layers created with the scripts.

Here is a quick sample of the method:

Before, almost straight from camera (actually two pics stitched together and not from camera but “camera”, ie. pics taken with mobile phone):
http://files.myopera.com/parakap/albums/5425152/0korpilahti-3.jpg

After:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/parakap/5070948989/lightbox/

If someone wants to try it, I think that one or the other of the scripts calls for this plugin, which you need to install also:
http://photocomix-resources.deviantart.com/art/Gimp-Adaptive-Equalization-102411734

http://shotslot.blogspot.com/2010/01/high-dynam...

Jennifer, will happily do it for you if you like, but didn't want to snatch your shots right off your page and produce it ta-da!

I have a rough comparison in this post between the use of the Advanced Tone Mapping plugin for GIMP, Photomatix and Qtpfsgui for Linux.

The highly colourful images that you are talking about is usually people going overboard during the tone mapping. The process of creating a nice HDR can result in images that show you more detail than a normal image would. For example, the inside of a church, where there are lots of shadows and highlights together. or it can bring out a reflection that may not be readily visible in the normal image.

Hope this helps.

I googled it after reading this entry, because I really did not know, and I see that it means High Dynamic Range. Which is still not thoroughly helpful to me. Further reading reveals to me that it means something along the lines of super colorful, highly processed photos. So I got the answer I was looking for, but I thought maybe some other beginner like me wasn't so sure of what the heck you were talking about either, and might benefit from a little explanation.

I really like HDR photos…for instance, I thought the pictures found at the link that Shotslot put up were great. To me they have a depth, and mood that makes them very interesting. I however do not think of them as “photographs”, but more as digital art that started with a digital photo base.

One tip to shorten your process…
You can right click your layers in the layer list and choose add new layer, then choose the “Grayscale copy of layer” option in the options window that opens. This would save a few steps. And for the layer mask that gets inverted, just right click that layer, choose “View Layer Mask”, Colors -> Invert, and finally, uncheck the show layer mask option.