Nikonians Photo Galleries - Avoid Ver 2 HDR

I have often seen this building from I80 when heading up to Red Bluff CA, but was never prepared to stop. So when I knew I was headed upstate on Thursday, I was ready with my camera in the car. It was raining, but by the time I got to this point in the trip, it was reduced to a light mist. I first took a few standard shots and then took two series of 5 shots to use for HDR. This image is one HDR result that took a round trip through all of my post processing software. The start was to take 5 images from -2EV to +2EV with the 0EV exposure of f/10, 1/640, ISO 500. This was done hand held with my D700 and a 70-200 VR at 120 mm. The resulting 5 NEF files were opened in NX2 where I decided to change Auto WB to Direct sun even though it was misting and the sky was grey. This gave me a little color in what was a bland grey sky. I also changed the Picture Control to vivid no sharpening. I moved the 5 changed files to a folder and opened Photomatrix where I ran the HDR batch process and then opened the resultant HDR image and applied a tone curve using similar settings to Don Dmenges recipe in the HDR forum. I then took the resultant image into Photoshop CS4 where I now deviated a bit from Don's guidelines and entered lab space where I applied an S luminosity curve, and steepened A & B curves. I then applied sharpening in LAB as well. The file was then reverted to RGB and prepared for the Web. You will note this is a very different result than my Version 1 image which is a much more dramatic version of the building.