These photos look uncannily realistic?

The photographic world has a powerful new tool available in the latest version of Photoshop, you can use it to create High Dynamic Range images from two or three variably exposed scenes. The computer then finely grades the light intensity, so the darks, while still dark, retain their fine detail, and the whites don't overpower the pic. Used to be you had to set your exposure to average the whole scene, resulting in too-dark darks or "blown out" whites. HDR allows you to create images much closer to what our eyes actually see, hence the realistic clarity.

Here's the Wikipedia entry, and over 50,000 pics to browse over at the Flickr HDR group.