New to HDR

I had heard of this before,but really didn't look into it further. As of present I have a Canon 20D and Photoshop CS.I would love to get the newer versions of Photoshop,but they are expensive,so for now I'll stick with what I have.
Photomatrix looks like the best software(at least to me) for doing HDR shots,but it looks as if it only works with newer versions of Photoshop.Could you process a shot in Photomatrix ,then do final adjustments in PS CS?
Also is it possible to take one shot and then break it into three different shots in Photoshop RAW conversion,then use Photomatrix? I would imagine the shots probably don't look as good as shooting 3 different shots exposed at base then -2,+2 EV.
Its just I have some older shots and wondered If I could process them in Photomatrix to get an HDR effect.

Bsmooth wrote in post #7652937
I had heard of this before,but really didn't look into it further. As of present I have a Canon 20D and Photoshop CS.I would love to get the newer versions of Photoshop,but they are expensive,so for now I'll stick with what I have.
Photomatrix looks like the best software(at least to me) for doing HDR shots,but it looks as if it only works with newer versions of Photoshop.Could you process a shot in Photomatrix ,then do final adjustments in PS CS?
Also is it possible to take one shot and then break it into three different shots in Photoshop RAW conversion,then use Photomatrix? I would imagine the shots probably don't look as good as shooting 3 different shots exposed at base then -2,+2 EV.
Its just I have some older shots and wondered If I could process them in Photomatrix to get an HDR effect.

You do not really need a newer version of Photoshop to get a good results in HDR. You can create an HDR image out of single shot...convert them into TIFFs and merge them in Photomatix. Most of single shot HDRs look as good as the ones made out of 3 different shots.

Actually, you can import a single RAW into Photomatix, without making three tiffs from it. Sometimes this works even better than three copies from one, sometimes the three copies works better. Try both.

I tried Picturenaut today,but wasn't really impressed.On some photos it seemed to work great,but on others it looked terrible.Everytime I merged 3 pics though and after tonemapping the picture was extremely dark,and had to be lightenedup in tonemapping.Matter of fact all the photos after merging were reading -2.64,which seemed really strange considering it was 5 or 6 completely different pictutres that i tried it on.
I did have to set the images I picked manually how far apart they were.