I shoot landscapes and other still life-type stuff. Historical buildings, etc.


Recently upgraded to PS CS4, running on a brand new computer, so I'm anxious to make the best use of all this computing power.


Once upon a time I exclusively shot Kodachrome and hi-contrast B/W, and I missed the "look" I'd get from film, so I'm drawn to HDR.


At the same time, I'm increasingly interested in more high-end manipulation of images.


So I'm looking for recommendations on some software to supplement PS. I'm a graduate student, so I can get educational discounts on software... so price is less of an issue (with those programs/plug-ins that offer discounts). What, then, do the sages here recommend?


HDR:
Photomatix seems to be the choice, but I'm not big pushing into the "surreal" effects that Photomatix seems to be good at. Plus, in the comparisons I've seen, Photomatix seems to soften images more than other packages. HDR Tools is the other choice that tempts me the most, but it seems less user-friendly (and I'm still not tremendously experienced at post-processing) and renders a lot slower than Photomatix.


De-noising:
Topaz DeNoise, Noise Ninja, or something else? Noise Ninja seems to be the gold standard (and is cheaper with my student discount), but Topaz can be packaged with Clean 2 (very appealing to me for any portraiture I'll end up doing), Simplify & Adjust (which would be $10 in addition to the other stuff). Adjust looks like HDR Lite, but overall, Noise Ninja seems to be the best choice. Are there others, or am I overlooking anything?


Oh, an edit: I have hundreds of slides I had scanned at 4000 dpi and are full of noise, so de-noising is a HUGE priority for me. The ability to do batch de-noising would be good, too.


Any others that would be good to add to my toolkit? Now that I think about it, are PS's sharpening options good enough? My digital stuff, of late, doesn't need much in the way of sharpening (except, of course, after PP), but my older stuff (pre L-series lens) & scanned slides would benefit from sharpening.