First HDR

Following on my first HDR post last week. I played around with the RAW images I took while on the trip to west coast and clifsfs of moher.

To start off, am using the following softwares:

• Windows Live Photo Gallery - browsing images
  
• PhotomatixPro 3.0 - for generating HDR images from single RAW files and for tone mapping (the most imp. step for HDR processing). And mentioned in various tutorials I read, it does a much better job than Photoshop, so if you wanna do HDR, go for PhotomatixPro
• Photoshop CS2 - for some final cleanups, adjustments. If you generate HDR from different exposures shots, you can do much more stuff in photoshop layering 3/4 different versions of the shot and combining with tone mapped version. As I was using single RAW file, i only did few minor adjustments for filtering etc.

Ok, so here are the original 2 images first (not exactly same, but similar):

Final, HDR processed images:

I like the second one better, the cliffs of moher one. The first seems very blue with clear blue sky and blue water. I didn pretty similar processing on both images. I followed this tutorial on youTube.

One thing, its an evolving exp.; the more you do it, the more you learn and get better in finding the right tone, texture for the HDR.

What do you think, do the images looks any good?

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Some people think, its not true HDR becoz of single exposure RAW file and its just tone-mapping. Anyway just mentioning.