khurram1 wrote: Thanks for the advice Ernie - hadn\'t thought about the advantage of the Lens Optimizer. Do you know if steps such as stamping out dust and sharpening should be done before or after using Photomatix to process the HDR?
I don\'t use Photomatix, preferring Photoshop and Hugin, and now DPP HDR, all for various variations. For example, I like what DPP HDR does with Art Standard and saturation to zero for monochrome. In Photoshop I like Local Adaptation with the curve moved in at the top and bottom.
Generally in HDR software, treat each frame as identically as possible. If dust removal is done in Raw conversion, then it can be done the same for each frame. But if you are doing manual dust healing spot brush work, then it is will be a little different for each frame, so do that after the merge to HDR.
Likewise do sharpening after. However, a deeper answer is that sharpening is a three phase process: Capture, Creative, and Output.
Do a minimal amount of Capture sharpening. It depends on camera, but Canon recommends 3 (on scale of 10) for the 5D classic. Then merge to HDR (in DPP or other software). Then post-process the image in Photoshop, doing any Creative Sharpening there. Save that as 16 bit TIFF or highest quality JPEG (12 on scale of 12); I do the latter (using 16 TIFF for intermediate files). Open that for output resizing and sharpening. (Yes, you can open a high quality JPEG and not notice any degradation.) For output to printing sharpen a bit more than output to web.
