HDR vs Non-HDR

[biggerry]

HDR is great in my opinion, it gives us plebs with cameras that lack the dynamic range or without a set of graduated filters an alternative for getting those great shots with lots of dynamic range.

I have, however found myself moving away from the HDR option in some instances, there have also been a number of cases where I find a correctly exposed image and some NX2 PP really delivers results that i would prefer over the HDR version, I can also see whats going on behind the scenes so to speak.
I have found HDR images coming from Photomatix, for example, need quite an amount of noise reduction and increased sharpening not to mention that extra amount of tweaking to get that image looking sensible, which in the bigger scheme of things means quite a bit more time on each image and also the increased number of files sitting on my computer.

So for an example I worked hard on the following scene to try and see what image (HDR vs non-HDR) came out looking better and with the least amount of time.

Thoughts? comments?

(note one has had some distortion control on it, which I only just realised)

[surenj]

I prefer the non HDR first. BTW you have seemingly clipped the waves on the hdr one.

I think the photomatix look is too generic and as you say fraught with difficulties with noise and color casts. However some images do suit and it's hard for me to pick which one. [because I am sucker for color] For some scenes it would do justice to show the full gamut of color and dynamic range.

I am moving more and more to graduated filters and just combining exposures by hand.

[Murray Foote]

I think I prefer the first one. I presume that is the non-HDR. The second has a somewhat more saturated sky, maybe a touch too much and that's easy to adjust in the first if preferred just by dodging the sky. (Hmm, my Cibachrome background is showing; dodging is reducing the light falling on a print - the Photoshop tools for dodging and burning are wrongly named because we are working with positive images, not negatives. Not that I was advocating using the burn/dodge tools in PS.)

I initially preferred the more cloudy water effect in the second at the bottom left but after a while I'm more inclined to the first image. The second has what appears to be some yellow artifacts in the water at bottom right of the rock which I presume is an HDR misadventure.

There's HDR and there's exposure blending. I tend to use that more than HDR, but I don't use either of them very much. Most DSLRs these days have a very useful dynamic range and the last time I needed more than that I couldn't get either HDR or exposure blending to work but manual blending did.

[tommyg]

I'm picking the first as well, the water looks nicer, especially in the lower right corner. Also the rock in the morning has a warmer look to it - either is very nice though!