Digital BW, The Print

Luminous Landscape currently has an article and forum thread on HDR.  I don't want to duplicate it here, but I'm curious if people on this forum are finding HDR very useful with respect to B&W printing.  

With B&W I've always tended to increase contrast and do quite a bit of dodging and burning.  I think this is contrary to the usual color printing style and may make a difference in whether the automated HDR approaches are useful to us.  

So far, I do not find them very useful.  My central/main exposure with an auto-bracketing shoot is usually closer to the final contrast I'll want than is a stock HDR. 

As such, what I find is that with CS4 and its ability to align layers, I can do a better job than HDR by simply putting the main exposure on the top layer and slowly "erasing" the burned out areas with the -2 frame below, and later erasing the too dark areas in the central exposure with the +2 exposure below.  It feels to me just like the dodging and burning type of image compression I've always done in printing -- with just a little different workflow.  

I think the manual approach can avoid some of the artifacts of HDR, and the control it give plays into the aesthetic of printing that is central to how I see good B&W printing. 

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com