Ok, here's a better test. I took a series of 3 handheld RAW images I shot in Turkey of a beached boat.

- Bracketed Exposures
- exposures.jpg (39.76 KiB) Viewed 10472 times
To be fair, these were only about 1 EV apart, but it's good enough for a test! These were converted in Photoshop to TIF images without any RAW adjustments whatsoever. The TIF files were loaded into PhotoStudio.
First, I adjusted the image manually, and here is my result:

- Jim's Manually adjusted image
- photostudio_boat_Jim.jpg (73.12 KiB) Viewed 10472 times
Not bad! I was quite pleased! Note that the image was brought into Photoshop, changed to sRGB and reduced in size - no other adjustments were made.
Next, I clicked on the auto adjustment icon in the lower left to see what PhotoStudio would do on it's own and here is the result:

- Automatic adjustments
- photostudio_boat_auto.jpg (69.83 KiB) Viewed 10472 times
There appears to be a lot more detail showing, but I'm not sure if I like the results. It appears to me to be too little contrast, but it might be a good start to begin manually adjusting!
Again, this was brought into Photoshop and only resized and converted to sRGB.
Finally, I decided to try the noise adjustment and had an unpleasant surprise. I pretty much used the default settings, and it took nearly 10 minutes on my laptop to finish. Unfortunately, here are the results:

- What the ???
- photostudio_boat_noise.jpg (30.49 KiB) Viewed 10472 times
I have no explanation for the strange black out extending across the image. I tried an undo and redo, refresh, but the artifact remained. I'm going to send this to the folks at Unified Color and I'll let you know what they say!
UPDATE - 7/8/09 - I'm impressed with the quick and rapid response I've received from Unified Color. However, they have not been able to recreate this odd result and I have not been able to replicate it either. If anyone else happens to try the software and gets a similiar result, please save out the "recipe" (which is a complete history of actions/adjustments taken) and let me know and I will see the results get to them.