cyra wrote:
It is interesting though, that only Samuli and you noticed. I was testing with how much "bad processing" I can get away (since it is actually impossible to do with this picture).
Well on film many people used ND-grads and some people didn't find the überdark treetops annoying. Even in digital era some people use ND-grads. So in some sense it's ok - for me personally this kind of effects are as bad as badly done HDR. What comes to impossible, I doubt it, but it would take 5+hours to do the layer masks perfectly with 5D and I don't dare to guess how long it would took for 5Dmk2 image with such scene.
However this look very good candidate for PhotoMatix Pro, if you want I can process it for you next week, but I need low contrast (in Apple Aperture I adjust black point from standard 3 to 1.0 to get low contrast input files for HDR) 16bit Adobe RGB files or RAW-files to do that.