WC#716 Dusk ona Northern

Jim, this is a fine sunset view across this lake, with good colors in the sky and attractive reflections in the water.  I also like your framing.  As I looked at this, my initial reaction was that it lacked contrast, especially in the foreground grasses and the tree trunk on the right.  There's also some grey in the clouds above the hot spot that doesn't look quite right.  A look at your earlier post verifies these thoughts.  The lack of foreground contrast shows up as a lack of drama that to my eyes makes this version a gentler but less dramatic view.  When I do "HDR", I take multiple exposures in camera and then hand blend them in PS.  That lets me add in texture and color only in the areas where it was lacking in the base exposure.  If you want an example of my approach, go here where I blended in the sky from a -2 stop version along the "V" in the ridge line to cover an area that was blown in the main exposure.

I think you'll also find that you receive more comments when you do more commenting.

Jim; The dynamic range of this kind of scene is usually so extreme that HDR processing of a single raw file will rarely be able to deal with it.  When I shoot sunsets with very strong direct sunlight, I always shoot multiple bracketed shots (usually at least 3) with the darkest exposed perfectly for the sky (sunlight) and the lightest exposed perfectly for the foreground and then do a BLEND rather than use HDR creation and mapping. The results are always more natural with a blend in my opinion.  I agree entirely with Mark's critique plus I have to add that the horizon is tilted pretty significantly CCW.