HDR Scenery

I am really looking for some feedback on this. I am working on learning my way around HDR for natural looking images. I know the sky is not the best but I was waiting around for an area of blue to sneak in. Grabbed this set as a test and never got my blue sky before it rained!!

Taken as 7 shots, 1 stop between images. Shot on a tripod with wireless trigger. 5dIII with 70-200 F2.8 Processed in Photomatix (trial) using Fusion - Natural then finished in LR

I would be very interested in feedback / ideas on HDR as well as final editing.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …thwoods_photo/9​473917765/

what did your normal exposure look like?

It's hard to tell from a 'natural looking' HDR, but based on the overcast sky I would guess that you really didn't need HDR to achieve the same end result. It doesn't look like there was enough of a dynamic range for it to have exceeded what your camera would have recorded in raw. If that was the case, you could have achieved the same result using one of your middle range shots and tweeking it in Photoshop.

Your processing looks fine, as far as you took it. Personally, the only changes I would have made would be to darken the green a little at the base below the flowers, and to jack up the sky a bit in NIK.

it is little bit difficult to handle greenery in hdrs. for landscapes scenes digital blending to me appears to be a better choice as it keeps the picture looking natural .
for digital blending for landscapes scenes you need just few shots usually 3 will do very good job. for scene with lower dynamic range like overcast weather condition
you might get good result even with the single shot.

here is single shot. the shot was processed once for highlights (sky, cloud) and once for foreground (greenery) and in photoshop using masking got the sky of one shot and
foreground of the other shot.

Here is the midrange shot from the set. SOC

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …thwoods_photo/9​477846347/

I noticed that the HDR version really brought out the detail and different greens between the different trees. Not much else though.

This scene didn't really gain anything from HDR imo. I would have just edited the base image.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I will continue to experiment. I really wish I had gotten this with blue skies.