HDR doesn't look right

I'm at work and don't have an example here with me but I've tried to do a few different HDR and none have come out. In fact, they have all looked worse and had less detail that what the camera takes for the shot based on the cameras meter.

I usually do -1, 0, +1 and everytime the '0' looks better than the merged photo.

So on the weekend I thought maybe I wasn't using enough photos. So I took -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 and again the image '0' looked much better than the merge.

I have CS3 and usually open them in Automate to HDR or whatever it's called. Should I be adjusting each .jpg separately and then doing the merge or should I merge and then adjust afterwards. I've been doing the latter and to be honest they all look like crap. They are extremely dull and flat and not nearly as sharp. Any ideas?

What kind of scene are you shooting? If the scene does not have a high dynamic range of luminance, then shooting it for HDR combination and processing those images can yield a nasty looking result. Try your technique on a scene that has at least a medium to high dynamic range - for example, an indoor scene with a window that is exposed to bright daylight/skylight. This scene will not be able to be captured completely in a single exposure, a perfect candidate for HDR.

Trying HDR workflow on non-HDR scenes is often a confounding process - the first step to making an image of an HDR scene is finding an HDR scene!

Here is a very recent post with another forum member experimenting with this type of scene, with my comments on capturing that scene effectively for HDR, toward the bottom of the thread:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=673634

After you create the HDR dataset (by merging the exposure sequence) you need to tonemap the image to an LDR format. There are a gazillion options for this, but a lot of people get less than desirable results form the options in CS3 - maybe another tonemapping package will do you better? Also - you may need to tweak the tonemapped LDR to get your "final" image - don't operate under the assumption that the tonemapping process will yield your final image.

Have fun experimenting!

Kirk