If you have followed
Craig Corl's recent posts on HDR, he demonstrates many possibilities of the process. Craig notes there is no real need to establish baseline processing rules which could be said about any artistic medium. I too initially wrestled with how to use HDR to produce a convincing photograph and not imitate an illustration or painting. Nevertheless, if the results are appealing to the author or artist, there's no reason not to experiment with extremes. This image was post-processed through Photomatix twice. I applied subtle adjustments each time and then used Photoshop to mask the sky, white wall to the right and ocean for various tonal corrections and contrast. If you have both PS and LR don't forget to go to LR Preferences and point to PS as an external editor that will save time when bouncing back and forth between the applications. I particularly like that editing in PS and saving the resulting processing there automatically imports the edited photograph as a stacked version in LR.
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