3 stages

JoYork wrote in post #7033110
Thanks folks. I think I sometimes spend too long on an image and can't see the wood for the trees.

Right now I'm going back to photos I took in the summer and re-processing them. It's useful to come back to an older photo with fresh eyes.

And you're right about doing what makes me happy. I remember reading an interview with Ricky Gervais where he said he writes comedy that makes him laugh and if only a small percentage of people get it then great. He's not going to write for the mainstream because he'd feel like a sell out. He's right.

Collin85 wrote in post #7022621
Have you tried a B&W conversion with that final shot you posted there? I think it would look a-w-e-s-o-m-e.

If you're happy with the way that final shot came out, then that's what's important. Different people have different tastes when it comes to HDR, and I guess mine is that I only really enjoy ones which increase the dynamic range without making it look 'unreal'. A bit extreme you might be thinking, and I'd be inclined to agree for sure. On the other hand, many others use the means of obtaining HDR to also make the image look a little poppy - at the expensive of realism - which is perfectly fine of course. I think that final image you posted there is very pleasing on the eye. The colour cast you introduced and the scene itself reminds me of battlefield Europe during WWII. Don't ask.

When I first started with HDR, I went through the same route as you. I used a few programs, settled on Photomatix and often ended up with the results demonstrated in your #2 image. But I wasn't very happy with that. So I investigated PP-ing of my own and often end up with images resembling your #3. Basically, poppy, pleasing to the eye images. That was absolutely fine to me (and still is), but if you get used to only being able to obtain those sorts of conversions, you can become stuck when all you want one day for a particular photo is to just increase the dynamic range. In other words, sometimes you may want to just simply make the original image look like it has a little more dynamic range, without any sort of fancy conversion into a poppy, fancy, a-little-unreal version. In those situations, the skills of being able to increase the DR without resorting to software like Photomatix (which often 'artifialise' things) become very important.