I cannot for the life of me get a decent looking HDR like most people are able to get. I've done everything from 1 RAW to 3 seperate exposures to 5 separate exposures. I'm shooting with a D2H at 200ISO for everything plus a decent tripod. I use Photomatix Pro with no noise reduction software. Any help?

An Example from start to finish might help?

Well I don't have a starting one, but this was composed of 5 shots I believe.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25409157@N03/2411786331/


I am actually looking for a more unrealistic product and when I try to do this it just becomes grainy. Would increasing the exposure help?

explain your workflow from start (taking the original shot or shots) to finish, including camera settings and software settings.

and when you say you're looking 'for a more unrealistic product', you might want to explain that as well. 'unrealistic' is a pretty broad category.

My apologies for the lack of information. By more unrealistic I mean an image like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/istargazer/170181329/

Ok, my workflow.

ISO:200
f-stop: ~9
Manually bracketed shutter speed in increments of +1/-1
Around 5 shots from a decent tripod.

I need my original pictures for sure, I think I'll try some HDR's tomorrow and get the originals up for you guys to help. But so far in my description, any problems jump out at you? I think I might start overexposing from the beginning, the darker frames I think are screwing me but I don't know of any other way to capture the sky...

It not only looks grainy but very flat also.. Like there were more shadow shots than highlights and you may have emphasized the shadow noise that is so prevalent in digital..

After reading some reviews on the D2H there were many references to excessive noise.. so It may just be the sensors used..

You might try tweaking the individual exposures before doing the HDR.. even as far as running a noise reduction on them without any sharpening applied.. "Imagenomic Noiseware" or any other popular ones should work pretty good.

I thought this would be somewhat unrealistic and it shows the noise

ur work flow dont include processing at photomatix.
did u tone map ur hdr in photomatix. i believe default tone mapping will give u great result

You could also try using a lower ISO, if the shot is daylight then go as low as you can.
The higher the ISO the more grain\noise is introduced into the image.

Graeme