Curious effect in HDR highlights

Question

For me, I'm afraid, HDR is always a disaster area. I very seldom use it, and when I do I usually spend hours fiddling
and then lose my temper and go back to
choosing the best exposed raw, developing it carefully, and then if there are any blown bits,
replacing those from a better exposure using layers
by hand. But I thought I would try it today with CS5 fully updated.
The subject is a stained glass window inside a church. I took five raws which photoshop Merge to HDR Pro declares to be at +2.32 +1.22 0.00 -0.85 and -1.43 stops. I set the xmp sidecars to force a white balance of 5000K and +58 tint to suit the outside lighting, but otherwise left ACR to its own devices.
The darkest of these images looks like this in ACR (if I go into ACR manually to see):
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Clearly there are no blown highlights, and we have texture all over the woman's face.
However, after the HDR has been created, there is no HDR toning method that I can find that avoids the following appearance:
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The slightly greenish grey areas of the face are not blown, they have a value around 212 on photoshops info panel.
Any idea what causes this?
The five raw files are each around 23MB. Could put them up on a web site if anyone feels like looking into this.

Answer 1

Well, I just went through an exercise in which I took 5 images at roughly 1 stop increments.  The image has some shaded areas and some bright sky
in it.
I then did the whole Merge to HDR thing and tweaked the controls until I got what looked like a pretty natural image, though the breeze moved the trees enough so that ghost removal didn't work entirely.
I then took the middle (correct or best) exposure, and worked on it in Camera Raw and Photoshop to produce the best possible result.
I see two things:
1.  The sky in the HDR result seems bluish, when in fact there was little blue in the part of the sky that was off to the left.  Is this another manifestation of the reported highlight color shift?  Unknown.
2.  After only a very little bit of work, I made the non-HDR image look as good, IMO, as the HDR result.  There might be things in the HDR image that one could argue are better, and there might be things in the other one that one could say are better, but from my perspective it is a wash.
Maybe this isn't the best example of Merge to HDR use, and I will look for other extremely high contrast subjects that are to experiment further.
Here are my results.  See for yourself.
Perhaps this feature is for very specialized shooting, but I have to say I'm finding it hard so far to see a whole lot of advantages to it.
-Noel