I emailed one of the developers and while I'm sure most of you know what he told me I thought I would share it with the group.:

In luminance you can create an hdr from a single image if you have saved it in raw (raw files usually use 12bits or more for every channel so a larger dynamic range than jpegs). Luminance can take advantage from that and of course you can then use its tonemapping operators. So if you shoot raw just open a single picture in luminance and play with the many operators settings, all the alternatives are "fake"...


--
:-)~MIKE~(-: