Nikon Raw Workflow - Pre HDR - Photomatix Pro

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[DaddyOh]

I am new on the forum....  Nice to be here.

So I'm just starting down the HDR journey and have a D300s.  I have aperture, photomatix pro, photoshop cs3 (soon getting cs4).  I also have Nikon Capture NX2.  I want to experiment with preprocessing the raw files in various ways before converting to HDR files and then tonemapping.  For example desaturating the images.  edge detection, sepia and duotone...  Just thinking I could get some interesting affects that way.

But photomatix does not support raw file manipulation other than color temp and capture NX2, while it has a save to NEW format, appears to just resave the original image.  Am I missing an option or should I just import into Photoshop, process there and save as TIFF.  What about the loss of information?

thanks

[DAVE RHUBERG]

If you add your adjustments into the mix, you are missing the full range of information in your 32bit HDR file.
Process RAW with ONLY color temp and crop/align adjustments.  From Photomatix or CS3 (with Photomatix plugin is what I use) make your adjustments for tone and color in 32bit and save a master in .EXR or .HDR format.   Then tonemap and make a picture with the full range of information you have available, don't worry about contrast yet, get the detail.    Now in CS3 16bit, make adjustments to get the shadows and highlights punchier with more contrast you like.  If you go for good looking shadows and highlights in HDR, you will be throwing away detail.