sunrise in HDR

Too much HDR
Any cc welcome

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I'm not feeling the need for HDR in this one, the sky looks underdone and the ground looks overdone IMO

I like it. The image has a soft dreamy feel to it that I think is fitting. I honestly have lost my taste for the HDRish look, it's just so overdone... Anyways, if you go into photoshop, edits, shadows/highlights, and bump up the midtone contrast, you might get some good results. I can't tell much off my crappy laptop monitor though.

Is it OK to perform image editing on your image to show an example?

Edit: ok i read in the rules that if you had the "image editing OK" i can edit it, sorry.

here is the edit: excuse the quality, i had only few minutes to work on it and the source was the cropped JPEG from the post

higher contrast between shadows and highlights to bring the bumps in the sand out a little more,
warmer light from the sun and on the clouds, and those rays of light below the clouds are beautiful, so i made sure they are more noticeable
could probably do a better job with the raw and more time, but just to give you the basic idea on how you can improve it more (of course based on my own opinion, it doesn't mean anything)

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The original looks fine, considering, but there's something off with the foreground (focus?)...could be caused by the HDR process which also tends to 'flatten' some images...contrast boost would help here. Need to watch splitting the frame with the horizon. I also have to disagree with the comment about the sky looking "underdone". Too often, people attempting HDR go way too far, to the point where the sky looks nightmarish...yours looks more natural than most I've seen on here. The whole point of HDR is to mimic what the eye sees by processing multiple exposures to cover the dynamic range (unless one purposely wants the circus look).

TBH though, the use of a GND would have worked better than HDR. Also, think about focusing using the hyperfocal distance technique.