Image editing - does this look fake?

I've been working with one of my photos, trying to pull some detail out of the foreground. I've been able to do that, but I'm worried the results look fake. Following are 3 images. I scanned the slide twice, trying to get more detail out of the slide, instead of doing it all in Photoshop. One image is dark, one image is light. I think my technique was pretty lame, and the results show it. I'm wondering how others would have tried to accomplish this.

Dark scan
Light scan
Composite

Thanks!

Looks perfect to me!

Looks natural to me Brent.

Jim

I think it looks real good

I've got to say that it seems off to me, and you can really see it on the guy's outline and the edge of the rocks. But your close I think to a natural image if you can find a way to reduce that area.

Overall I like it much more than the single images. Neither single image comes close to showing the true dynamic range that the eye would.

I would like to see a little more work on the sky and possibly the outer range. If you treated them as a seprate layer they could be enhanced/possibly darkened and some of the haze removed.

Other than that it is great.

OK, thanks for the comments everyone. I was just chatting with Scott, and he mentioned the Shadow/Highlight tool in CS2. I've only recently upgraded from PS7, so this was a new tool for me, and I decided to give it a try. I made a couple tweaks. First, I used the lasso to try to select just the hiker, the rocks, and the trekking poles, with a feathered edge. I used Shadow/Highlight on that selection, and got it to a more natural lighting (a little darker than my previous composite, but significantly brighter than the original scan). Then, I ran Shadow/Highlight again, this time for highlights over the whole image, which tweaked the background a little. And one more tweak was using a Hue/Saturation layer to take a little blue out of the mountainside in the far background.

HERE'S what I ended up with. I think the overall image is a lot better, and you can't see as much of an edge around the hiker.

Derek - I'm interested in how you think some of the haze could be removed. I'm not sure I know how to do much more with the background without it becoming obvious.

Brent,

I think you have already done what I was suggesting in part with your updated version. The sky and background ridge look less hazy and a little more saturated.

Keeping in mind the goal of a natural look, I would work a bit with levels and curves trying to bring out contrast and color without blowing things out. But I think it has really come along. I don't know how much more it can be tweaked.

With these extremes in DR I will sometimes have 3 layers and tweak all seperately - one for the sky, one for the mountain background and one for the foreground. Then blend all three using the technique Jesse describes on his site.

Looks great - sell it to a CO outdoor guide!

Brent, the new version using Shadows/Highlights is much improved. The first composite struck me as an overlay just looking at it, but the new version is much less jarring in thar respect.

I really like the new one, Brent. Looks perfect.

How to remove haze? I'd make a duplicate layer, run an 'S' Curve on the layer, do a mask (fill it with black) and paint in the changes (most in the sky).

Or get Nikon Capture NX and do the changes much easier

Fake? Nah. Contrived?
At least have your subject pointing and gazing off into the distance.

Where's the soaring bald eagle?

Seriously, looking good.... I think it just could use some minor contrast and saturation bumps...

On the composite I see the hard edge between one scan over the other, yet it looks ok.

One trick for making composites look seamless is to slighly blur the edges between composited elements. This is most easily done using the blur tool, with a very small brush. If you have white fringes, set the brush blending mode to "darken" and it will fill in the gaps.

The only place I see a visible seam is on the hiker's left calf.

Here is Jesse's technique which I like to use. It is a good PS tutorial:

http://www.jessespeer.com/making_the_image/digital_gnd.html

Wow, I like that tip by Jesse, thanks, Derek!

Looks good to me. I really like that shadow/highlight control.