All of the responders so far have links to their websites. The original poster provides no link in his profile or with his post here, nor any examples of his HDR work. I think it would be helpful if he could provide some examples of his work, to provide some idea of what he considers a natural look with this process.
I have mostly used Photomatix HDR/tonemapping and exposure fusion for this kind of processing, although I have recently been experimenting with Enfuse, since Kirk has said that he is getting better results with it than Photomatix fusion. I generally prefer the exposure fusion process to HDR/tonemapping, since I think it is much harder to produce realistic looking results with the latter, and exposure fusion has a tendency to minimize the appearance of noise, whereas HDR/tonemapping has a tendency to exaggerate it.
Since exposure fusion is less able to bridge very high contrast ranges than HDR/tonemapping, I will sometimes layer the darker exposure in with the "fused" image to hold more highlight detail.
That said, most of my contrast reduction processing is done solely with brackets and layering with Photoshop.
