Historical:Contrast Blending Actions

The Contrast Blending Actions stack and mask differently exposed images in order to combine the correctly exposed parts of all images in the result. The result can be visually controlled by adjusting layer opacity as well as by editing the masks.

These are Photoshop actions.

Action set and more information on http://www.erik-krause.de/blending

This is a semi automatic and slightly enhanced version of the techniques described on http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

See Contrast Blending for a collection of some other techniques.