HDR editing in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom

I'll reiternate what I said above.

It's been a while, but when I tested Adobe's HDR Pro by merging raw files, it ignored all tone controls that may have been set in ACR before doing the merge. Most HDR guides tell you not to change tones (exposure, brightness, shadows&highlight recovery) before merging.  Adobe apparently forces that advice.

Test yourself. Merge a brackted set with no tone controls and save the tif. Then make gross adjustments to the tone controls (slam exposure sliders to the max) and merge again, saving a different tif.

Load both tifs in ACR and see if you can find a difference.

Of course, when you use some other HDR program (ex: Photomatix) to process raw files, the program uses the dcraw converter which gives you no access to tone controls. Other prgrams are unable to use the ACR adjustments when processing raw.