I don't get it. Assuming your final intent was just the rock face which has a very low dynamic range, so you ended up with an overexposed shot that would bring up the shadow detail under the car and an under exposed shot that would have given good detail in the sky and sunlit exposed rock/cement. Then you ran them all through the High Dynamic Range process which brought the sky, sunlit rock face and shadow detail under the car into a compressed exposure and then cropped all that HDR work out and were left with the base 0 ev exposure which you then ran through some basic PP. What was the point of HDR? Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful photo I just don't understand all the wasted time and effort of running the HDR process and then eliminating it in the crop on this shot. Your other PP gets a big from me.

I don't get it. Assuming your final intent was just the rock face which has a very low dynamic range, so you ended up with an overexposed shot that would bring up the shadow detail under the car and an under exposed shot that would have given good detail in the sky and sunlit exposed rock/cement. Then you ran them all through the High Dynamic Range process which brought the sky, sunlit rock face and shadow detail under the car into a compressed exposure and then cropped all that HDR work out and were left with the base 0 ev exposure which you then ran through some basic PP. What was the point of HDR? Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful photo I just don't understand all the wasted time and effort of running the HDR process and then eliminating it in the crop on this shot. Your other PP gets a big from me.

Parked the car next to a stucco clad flower box on a side-walk. When exiting the car I noticed that some fairly well talented artist had painted three cats on one side of the flower box. It showed some weathering but was still in pretty good shape. This is a three-shot HDR. Nikon D7100, Nikon 18-140 telephoto lens, natural light. Three shots handheld bracketed at plus and minus 0.3 EV. Processed in HDR3 Projects and exported as 16 bit tif to Paintshop Pro X8. Tweaked very slightly for brightness and contrast. Cloned out unshaded area in lower left corner and removed small crack line above middle cat. Cropped and resized for posting.