Already have it!    Seriously, just use tone targeting, select the sky, and then use something like radius 4, strength -100.  Noise reduction is nothing more than softening/blurring so this should work really well in this shot since the sky is a unique color and you don't have anything in that sky that you need to remain sharp (like high contrast edges).  This actually may work better than Noiseware because it'll only noise filter the sky and will leave the rest of the photo alone.

So yes, Qimage Ultimate already has tone targeted noise filtering.

Mike

Hi Fred-

You cannot get what you don't have.  Only a bracket and HDR or merge will recover a bright sky behind an overcast foreground.  Of course you could burn in, but it would be unnatural.

You have hit the nail on the head.  That is the biggest gripe about over processed HDR.  They get surreal.  Kind of like "super real" paintings.  This is where less is more!

It was a windy day, and the 'simple' raw was shot before the hdr set.

I do wish I had not included it, I only succeeded in clouding the issue. 

But then again it led me to all that follows and that was most instructive and forced me to think a little deeper.

Jeff

Mike- Can we do that now with QIU?

If so, would someone give us the steps? Have always loved the beauty of various HDR photos; however, I have never attempted. I do not own software that would create that effect...unless you are saying QIU can do this now.

Thank you very much! Will try it soon on some shots I have already taken that may fit your description. Will get me to explore the other settings/tools within QIU.

Then I will take some new shots and "go to school".

Thank you again Mike!

Seth, you just repeated everything I just said.  But I think you are trying to place requirements on HDR that do not exist.  There are a number of methods of achieving HDR and taking multiple shots is not a requirement.  Some people do it that way but it is not always necessary: and the point of my post here, not as necessary as some people believe.  You could take several JPEG's and run a contrast reduction on them to create an HDR image.  When you do that, you are simply taking the dynamic range that exceeds that of a "standard" photo (one designed to be displayed on your monitor/printer) and compressing it so that it now fits into the smaller space of your monitor/printer.   Now a raw image has several stops more range than a JPEG to begin with so I could do the same thing with one raw and get the same results.


The dynamic range of the sensor is irrelevant.  And you are dead wrong that you can't expose for sky and still get good detail in the backlit landscape from one raw.  I do it all the time, and so do many others.  Here's a quick example first with standard processing and then with HDR done simply by using the fill light in Qimage's raw refine.  This is from a single raw, all processing done in Qimage Ultimate:




The first shot is "standard processing".  That is: it maps dynamic range without compressing it.  The second one, even though it came from the same raw file, is now HDR because you are allowing the observer to view far greater dynamic range from the lightest to darkest areas of the image than the linear (technically gamma mapped) image.  As long as you end up with a photo that allows you to view subjects with a much broader dynamic range than you would get from the standard luminance curve, you have HDR.

It really doesn't matter how you got there!  Think about it this way.  You have a point and shoot that doesn't even offer raw and I have a Canon 5D Mark II.  You take five JPEG shots on your point and shoot and you end up with a decent landscape/sky shot that you call HDR because you merged multiple photos and "crunched" the dynamic range.  Now I take one photo from the 5D MKII and get the same shot with even better quality due to the sensor and the fact I used raw.  So you can call your 5 JPEG's HDR because they are multiple shots but I'm not allowed to call my (better) photo HDR?  Another example... you have a smaller dSLR with a small sensor and I have a full frame dSLR.  It takes you three raws on your "cheaper" dSLR to match the dynamic range of my one shot.  If you put your three raws together and I just do tone mapping (fill) on my one raw and the results are the same, yours from the cheap dSLR is HDR but mine isn't?  Doesn't make sense.  It simply makes no difference how you get there.  If you are able to produce a photo with significantly enhanced dynamic range from that of "normal" processing (meaning a non-modified tone curve), then you have HDR by definition.

Mike

It'd probably look a bit "odd" keeping the sky and clouds from the first shot.  Might look cool though.  The short answer is no: the current fill in Qimage was designed to remap everything so that it remains "connected".  Obviously the data is there to do it though because both renditions came from the same raw file, so with the right tone mapping it can certainly be done.  Hey maybe that'll be the next big thing in Qimage Ultimate: tone targeted contrast mapping.   

Mike