Wind

[maddogmurph]

Critique, Pref'd? Two shot blend for highlight recovery. Added the Alien Head since they are basically similar.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Looks artificial, sorry

[maddogmurph]

Looks artificial, sorry

Oh well I'm glad I posted. Both of them? Hmm.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I like Alien Head, but not the title.

[mlewis]

Both the Wind images look wrong to me.  That beam of light looks bad and fake.  The Alien Head image is great.

[stamper]

I think you need clipped blacks for this to work? The lack of contrast is obvious.

[maddogmurph]

I think you need clipped blacks for this to work? The lack of contrast is obvious.

I'm not following. Here are the uncombined files. Nothing has been done to these files except raw processing.

[stamper]

Because your raw files didn't have clipped blacks it doesn't mean that your final output shouldn't have them? Having said that this is obviously a matter of taste. Others have pointed out the artificial/fake appearance and my suggestion might change what you have presented?

[luxborealis]

I like the textures in the "wind" portion of the B&W version (and the background rock), but not the reverse haloing (dark haloing) around the spotlit section in the lower left - that's the part that, to me, makes it look artificial. Overall, the B&W works better than the colour - it certainly makes one stop, take a second look and wonder what one is looking at.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Your Wind3 looks almost right.

In your two OP photos, however, you've committed a crime against image rights. Not copyright, but an image's rights to be treated humanly and torture-free (you vote for Trump, by any chance?)

You took Wind3, which has the light shaft almost right, and lightened the background, while darkening the light, making it look like a paper cutout collage, and totally opposite of what brain expects to see (i.e., that light is, well, light, and non-lit objects are darker).

Processing artifacts (I suspect Clarity or excessive sharpening) do not help either the collage effect (the dark lines along the shaft):

[the_marshall_101]

Wind3 looks pretty nicely exposed just as it is, with the exception of where the light shaft hits.  Not sure what you can do about that, it's just massive dynamic range difference.  The attempt to merge exposures hasn't really worked for me.  Would it look weird cropped out entirely?