Exposure experiment - too much?

So I took this self portrait while goofing off and when I got home I decided it was time I tried playing with blending exposures. I took this picture pretty far, past what the scene likely looked like, I'm just curious though, does it look it too fake? People are too nice on this forum so please be honest, it only took ten minutes. It's just an experiment..

i honestly like the original in the last one...the first shot is way too much in my honest opinion. great idea, i just think that the subjects blend in with the already dark background too much. on the last one, you might could dodge the highlights on her face / scarf / jeans to bring her out more. just an idea?

nice work

I think the first retouched is still a little dark, but it would look nice.

I really love what you did with the second. Took care of the silly highlights, and really brought out the background.

I like what you've done with the first one, no it doesn't look quite natural but it definitely looks better than the original to me which has an overexposed sky and underexposed subjects. It would look more natural if you brightened the sky a tad. The second one I think is perfect, the sky and tops of the buildings are overexposed in the original and you've fixed that quite well. Looks realistic to me.

I like them both - the edited versions. I think the first one is especially good. The shadows are even good.

thanks, its pretty simple so i think i'll use it some more. for the second one i just made a second jpg from the raw file underexposed by about a stop for the sky, copied it into a layer, made a mask and painted in the darker sky over the original. its so simple im not quite sure why i waited so long to try it

Banf Alberta?

yup

I like the edited first one and I like the original second one if you could just bring down that house on the right a little bit.

if you have photoshop, maybe you should dodge your subjects to give them more detail like the originals.. be careful of making them look like some weird vignette unless that's what you're looking for

With exposure blending you may need to do more work than just two different areas because otherwise it will look strangely lit.

First off, one cannot take a bad shot in Banff

I like both of the edited versions...shows off the surroundings very well...

bigbaby987 wrote in post #5153356
if you have photoshop, maybe you should dodge your subjects to give them more detail like the originals.. be careful of making them look like some weird vignette unless that's what you're looking for

i'm not sure i understand, in the first edit i brightened the subjects by nearly one and a half stops, they're almost entirely black in the original.. anymore and they just turn into noise. in the second edit i didn't touch the subject at all, all that was darkened was the sky and the tops of the buildings on the right. sorry if i misunderstood you.. the first one was for fun but the second one i thought was pretty accurate to what i saw, what the dynamic range of my eye was.. it doesn't look natural? or is it that it doesn't look natural because we've been conditioned to know that a camera can't do that? just curious

Second one is freakin sweet. the first one, you two are lightened up too much. kind of a weird fake halo around her hair.

thanks