Aperture with Photomatix Plug-in

Yesterday I decided to take some of my pictures from San Francisco area and see what I could do with them as far as enhancing the colors and lighting. I used Aperture to create copies of the original, then took the copies and changed the exposure to -2 and +2, respectively. Then I used the Photomatix plug-in to combine all three into an HDR photo and tone mapped them. The results are pretty interesting. Some photos are greatly improved, while others just look a little cartoonish. There's definitely a lot of flexibility with this software, depending on the kind of look you're going for (realistic versus cool). Again, I'll show you the before and after photos: