PimpDaddy

Nicholas - the noise is a result of the HDR process itself. What it's doing is "pushing" the effective speed of the image in the darkest areas, and that means a lot of gain in the shadows of the image, and so the noise shows through. Plus the blue channel is always the noisiest, so dark skies always have the most problems from noise.

Compared to pushing the gain within a single exposure, you're right, but unless you are talking about 5 or 6 stops between the fastest and slowest exposures you're still talking about pushing the most under-exposed image by possibly 2 stops or more. If you start with RAW images that might be possible without too much noise and other artefacts, but certainly with JPEGS you'd probably need 6 or more exposures to cover the whole tonal range without noise. But of course you still have to end up crushing the tonal values in order to get them within the display range of a monitor, or print paper.

Gr8 x2 4 both the original and the result! :)
But I have a questions: is there any possibility that this HDR process keeps the EXIF data? :-?
I am very new to photography, so... :D