Btw, I just created a new video showing how I use luminosity masks to blend two exposures together...
Check it out : http://youtu.be/8R_RuDQ6r2w
Araz
ps. let me know if you find these kinds of video helpful by leaving a comment in Youtube or a thumbs up
Not sure about you're intent behind making these videos if, from what I gather from your last statement, appear to be requests for folks to only leave positive comments of praises for your efforts and whether the video is helpful.
Personally I really don't ever want to put that much work into a photograph in order to get the kind of "natural looking" results seen in your video. This applies to all online luminosity mask tuts, so don't take this personally, Araz.
I immediately had a problem with your use of Gaussian Blur that created the dark halos on the caps of the distant mountains, an artifact Adobe solved with their Clarity slider in PV2012. I also don't understand why you don't do most of the processing of the two exposures in Raw before finishing off in a gamma encoded pixel editor. The distant mountain now looks as if it has its own light source off angle to both sky light and the sun's rear position. That's not natural.
I also don't understand why your camera needed 1/8000 sec. shutter speed to still leave blowouts in the sky. When I shoot Raw single exposures of similar time of day (dusk/dawn) scenes with my 2006 6MP Pentax K100D DSLR I only need f/8, 1/400 sec., ISO 400 and get no blowouts in backlit clouds. Why didn't you underexpose even further to prevent that blowout?
And to get the kind of clarity, punch in color and local contrast seen in the greenery and rocks in the finished version, I use ACR/LR's Parametric Curve (incredibly quick and effective results), a bit of Shadow slider or Fill-(PV2010) and HSL adjusts. All the work is in real time with immediate preview feedback working this way. IOW there's no time for visual adaptation to screw up judgement in tonal relationships.
Working with all those layered masks I got lost on what, why and how the edit needed to be applied, so I didn't really learn anything useful and I've been digitally processing 1000's of images since 1997 as a hobby.