If you re going to use HDR use it wisely

HDR has many negative effects that I discuss inmy eBook on HDR. For example, HDR increases thegrain (not noise!), brings out texture, produces unnatural colors, and fills in all shadows. While the magnitude of the impact of these drawbacks can be minimized, HDR will always increase these things. Unfortunately, all of those things are negatives for portraits. While HDR can be perfect for shooting a portrait where detail and grunginess is the style of the photo (like a black and white of a bearded man in a third world country), most models don t want to look grainy, shadowless, and textured. But sometimes we want to shoot an HDR portrait anyway to get a cool look on the background. To get the best of both worlds, process the HDR normally and then process one of the single RAW images as a traditional portrait. Then mask together the two images so the skin of the traditional image is shown, but the HDR of the background is shown. Now you have the best of both worlds.