I recently shot some very high end Trex decks for friend who builds them. We only had two days to shoot 15 locations because he was on a deadline to enter the photos for a national deck design competition, so I had no control over what time of day we could shoot and many locations where heavily treed or backlit.
I mostly shot 3 image brackets at 2EV apart on the 5D3 and used LR CC to create the HDRs. The DNG created by LR looked very much like the evenly exposed image but I found it had alot more headroom when pushing and pulling shadows and highlights. Simply adjusting the sliders did not give ideal results. I had to use the brush tool and selectively dodge and burn areas to get the best results.
Even lightening dark shadows worked pretty well with one exception - objects that were in movement. Many of these decks had umbrellas, wind chimes and other such items movement from the wind. For some reason, when bring shadows up on these items, I did get quite a bit of noise, I think it was the way LR handled the ghosting. If I used the lightest setting for ghosting, the result was little or no noise, but at times the movement was obvious so I had to retouch some of those images in PS to correct for that.
I do have Photomatix and Nik HDR Efex, which may have produced better end results, but the workflow through LR for this time critical project was much faster, I had nearly 100 images to edit in about 8 hours to make the deadline.
