IN an email today Franzis has a coupon code worth up to 40% off -- SPRINGSALE2018
Franzis sells some very good software -- pretty much the only complaints I've ever read in reviews & such is that the brand tends to be a bit harder to use &/or require a bit more learning than average. Whether their HDR Projects is for you depends mostly on whether you're after realism or not. If not, if you just want to create more dramatic images, HDR Projects is likely for you, whether you want to do HDR or not -- it can apply its FX with or without the HDR part.
There's Lots of advertising hype promoting a more stylistic image, with exaggerated colors &/or FX, for both UHD video & HDR photography or images. And like all advertising hype, it's not necessarily accurate -- 1) you can use the same sort of FX without the UHD or HDR parts, & 2), UHD & HDR really mean that you have more data to work with, so that you can show a wider gamut or more full range of colors, closer to what we see with our eyes. And since regular video & photos are pretty good at that all ready, the difference with UHD & HDR can be pretty subtle. Which in a nutshell is why there's all this hype in the 1st place, to convince you to spend your money.
The exception, where HDR photography can make a big difference, is when you're trying to capture an image of a scene with poor lighting that you either can't control, or where you want to use only natural lighting. You can see a couple of great examples here: photoshopcafe[.]com/tutorials/HDR_ps/hdr-ps.htm
To do HDR photography you take 2 or more photos with your camera at different exposure settings, e.g. overexposed to capture more shadow detail, underexposed to get highlights that aren't blown out. Software then 1st aligns, then combines the images.
If you've got RAW images, Adobe Lightroom is the only software [AFAIK] that takes them & saves the result in their open .dng RAW format, so you can continue to work with the maximum amount of data, but it doesn't do anything fancy -- the only settings are for ghosting [where parts of the resultant image don't work out right]. HDR Projects OTOH has a ton of controls, plus loads of presets so you don't get bogged down trying to use all those controls, but when you're done you're no longer working with RAW images. If you're not using RAW images, HDR Projects is more likely the software you'd prefer & use -- you just have to ignore all the fancy stuff if you're after realism.
The current top-of-the-line is HDR Projects 2018 Pro -- in between you have HDR Projects 4 Pro, 5 Pro & Std., & 2018 Std. If you get their emails Franzis offers sale pricing from time to time, & their upgrade policy is pretty liberal in my experience, which also gets you reduced pricing. Installing HDR Projects has minimal impact on Windows, and a relatively small footprint on disk. Franzis software is also reliable [haven't ever seen it crash], and hasn't complained when I've installed it in both win10 & win7 on this PC using the same numbers, both with giveaways & apps I've paid for. I do tend to put their plug-ins in the app's folder, using shortcuts to those plugins in image editing software's plug-in folder.
Personal thoughts...
HDR Projects *to me* is special FX software that coincidentally has the capability of merging 2 or more photos of the same shot into one HDR photo. Merging 2 or more photos that are identical except for exposure settings simply combines their data into one HDR image, that includes shadow & highlight data not available from your camera in a single shot at the best overall exposure setting. All the controls -- basically FX -- that HDR Projects offers are unnecessary unless you're after those FX. If those FX are what you're after, Great. If you're after realism OTOH, all those extras are just something to add to user confusion.