HDR Workflow – Part 1

Saturday, May 1, 2012 – Good morning!!  So I’ve been reading a lot of articles regarding HDR workflow and plugins associated with this kind of shooting/posting.  There seems to be a lot of differing opinions regarding noise reduction/removal tools that center around noise ninja, topaz denoise, nik’s dfine, and imagenomic’s noiseware.  So far from my readings and touching base with people (professionals and friends) it seems like the two to pick from are imagenomic and nik.  I downloaded the plugin from imagenomic last night and didn’t realize that it would leave a grid on my final image which does me no good at all.  Further reading points to downloading the standalone application which will allow me to use that for 15 days (hopefully with no grid).  So far nothing I have read will allow me to process from the RAW and sidecar XMP files which increases the time for my workflow.  As it stands I need to open files in ACR, make changes to white balance, exposure, fill light, recovery, contrast, and possibly saturation in the HSL sliders, apply those to all images and finally save those to tiff files for further processing in photomatix pro.  I will then combine those into a 32bit file and tone map that back down to a 16 bit tiff which I will further process in photoshop.  I believe it is at this point that I can apply the NR or noise reduction software but this is where the confusion comes in.  There are schools of thought that say to remove noise at the beginning of your workflow but by combining the images for hdr you introduce color noise and contrast noise from underexposed images.  Heh hence my dilemma.  What to do and how to do it in the most effective manner :).  I am not sure I have the time this weekend to perform my tests but I am going to use the same set of images, come up with a test pattern, and post these not only for reference for myself but to help others that might be going through this as well.  Have a great weekend and hope you all are well!!