Lover's point - My first HDR

[zephod]

This is my first shot at messing around with HDR. I took them during an afternoon out at lover's point as the tide was coming in. I used the CS4 process for the HDR and wondered what you guys would have done different. I tried to mess around with the hue and sat but ended up with these funky color bands throughout the photo. So should I back off on the processing a bit and was it too overboard going for the splash ups instead of taking a less active shot?



Camera: Nikon D80
Aperture: f/6.3
Focal Length: 200 mm
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
ISO Speed: 500

[vsa]

The splashes could use a bit more room in the image. Maybe zooming out a bit would help with that... anyways...

The slashes are totally blown out which isn't good. To me the colors are way too saturated.
You could try out a little trick with curves.

Make s curve to blue and red channels and bring the green channel down a bit:

Then change the blending mode of that curves layer to soft light and perhaps take the opacity down a tadbit.
Here's what I got from your image:

Desaturated your image a bit. Brightened the stones. Desaturated the green stuff on the stones a bit more. Added the curves thing explained above.



The splashes are what make the whole photo so you definitely don't want to lose those.