Picturenaut's x64 consistent multi-threaded architecture makes it the fastest tone mapper in the world. Nothing beats it running Reinhard's Photoreceptor Physiology in realtime on the full image. If you call a new 8 core box your own, you will see it haul through a 32 Megapixel image in realtime, while you find just the right slider settings. Picturenaut was born in the German photo community. It has been in the works for four years, with consistent improvements according to user feedback. It has always been freeware, thus setting the standard for making high quality HDR Imaging accessible and easy.

1. Create HDRIs from multiple exposures
Automatic image alignment
Exposure correction
Color balancing
Ghost removal
RAW support
Noise level compensation
Full control over camera curve

The HDR generation runs asynchronous from the user interface, that means less coffee breaks and a healthier lifestyle for you. Scripting ninjas can use the fully featured commandline version MKHDRI to weave it into an automated workflow.

2. Industry standards: Yes please.

It reads EXIF metadata and ICC profiles from the source images. Aperture, shutter speed and EV offset can also be edited manually, so you can easily compensate for ND filters and missing/false EXIF data. The ICC profiles are used to optionally derive a reliable standard camera curve.

You can also change the bit depth of any single LDR, and Picturenaut converts it properly into a pseudo-HDRI using a standard gamma curve, or any curve you saved from an ICC profile or derived from a set of calibration images.

3. Compatible with HDRShop
Plugins originally written for HDRShop integrate seamlessly into Picturenaut as well. They simply show up in the "Filters" drop-down menu. They run here better than ever, because their console output is routed to the display and Picturenaut doesn't time out on them like HDRShop does.

There is already is a great collection of filter plugins by Francesco Banterle, including:

Gaussian Motion Blur
Absolute HDR Calibration
Diffuse SH: spherical harmonics
Median Cut: light source extraction
MyFilter: custom convolution kernels
FakeHDRI: stretch out LDR pixel values
Physical Sky: generate procedural skies

Add on top a whole bunch of tone mapping operators, and you have a sweet package: Greg Ward, Drago, Scan, EriKate, ExpLog.