HDR and blending, sunset shot

For fun, I was reworking an image. I had 3 shots, each 2 stops apart. here is the middle shot

I like the final product. You've obviously put a lot of work into this shot.
The only things I don't like is the horizon being right in the centre but mostly that little contrail in the sky on the left hand side, that little thing grabbed my attention as soon as I first looked at the picture.

i like the final result too, nicely done and more importantly - not overdone. that contrail (?) on the left has to go.

Great shot. I'm trying to understand your PP technique.

So you left the high/low untouched, but pushed the mid exposure to correct the shadow areas, then used all three to HDR using PS, then took that to LR for final adjustments?

laramie, I used all 3 untouched (well, ca was taken out, and horizon leveled) to merge to a 32 bit hdr file. than I took the middle exposure and pushed it to get a single exposure I liked. however, that left to shadows that kinda fell apart. however, it had the best waterfall, and no ghosting form the birds. so I layered the processed HDR and the pushed middle layer, and used the shadows form the HDR image, to get very clean and nice shadows. used the pushed image for some of the water areas, and sky since it had the correct exposure.

^^^ Ok, that makes sense now. Thanks.