If you mean photostacking to get HDR-style photos on a DSLR, I'm familiar with the concept but I don't have Photoshop to play around with. Most of the situations that I find myself dealing with high-contrast light, where I'd want to use HDR, tend to involve those which I don't have a lot of time to set up and capture multiple shots(i.e. selfies(yeah I know) with my SO in the shade of a tree with a great view behind us).
Not sure what you mean by star trace - are you referring to something like this? [0]
If you have gimp, there are a couple ways of doing HDR there as well. For quick and dirty stuff, I found the exposure blend plugin [1] to work pretty decently. For more complicated stuff, doing the exposure masking yourself [2] also leads to real good results. As far as speed, there are a few apps out there that will let you bracket and do an automatic hdr sequence out there if you have a phone with an IR diode, yeah it means fumbling with two devices, but the results would almost certainly be well worth it.
Thanks for the links! I'll have to try them out. I've worked with exposure bracketing before so I get the idea, I just never really tried doing the parts thereafter in software. I'll have to give this a try soon.
Not sure what you mean by star trace - are you referring to something like this? [0]
[0] http://www.dimijianimages.com/More-page1/star-trails-Botswan...