In general people amp up the "strength" and ramp down the light smoothing too much, feeling (I think) that they're not really using the benefits of the process if it isn't extremely tone-mappy, I donno. I certainly have done that myself; see my "turbulence" entry in "perspective" for an amped-up, grainy look. On the other hand, my "sky" shot has no noise issues at all. Noise become particularly obvious in the blue channel, btw, so images with a lot of sky are very sensitive. And in underexposed areas in general.
A little bit of noise can easily be eliminated in NI, if that's what you have to do. But in general, if Photomatix is used for relatively natural-looking images from actual, different exposures, noise is simply not an issue. One of the problems in doing HDRI from differently-processed versions of a single RAW file is that all of the pixels & noise are exactly the same. With composites made of separate exposures, the noise tends to disappear for all practical purposes.
So you are really dealing with an artifact of "quasi" HDRI, not "true" HDRI, and it basically just limits your options. You can go further in pushing "true" HDRI in tone mapping, if that's what you want to do.
R.
Message edited by author 2006-12-23 01:15:26.
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