Finally figured it out

I was really not happy with the greenish color of the HDR images below, and finally realized - the problem is that the windows RAW colorspace is different from what the Mac uses with Nikon being sRGB.

Solved the problem by converting the images to the JPEG format by using ViewNX, and then doing the HDR magic. I still don't like this approach because of the less data the programs have to work with. There is still some confusion as the RAW files are converted to the same standard format before the program starts the HDR merge.

Liked Hydra for the Mac for natural looking images - will post that later.