hey bro, i dont know man i just play around hehe. thought its quite decent. when you say oversaturated which fragment of the tonemapping did i go wrong? is it the saturation highlights/ shadows section? do you have a default setting that you like to use? the coloring is odd cause the root images are taken in the flash white balance mode hoho , big mistake right
1) oversaturation is most prominent in the trees in foreground - the greens are so green that the details are blending into one solid piece. if you view it at 100% before resizing to web you will get what i mean. other than that, there is a prominent yellow cast throughout the whole picture. it doesn't bother me in the clouds, but on the houses and the foreground houses, it does. a bit is fine, this much, no good.
2) funny colorations - linked to what i just mentioned in #1 about houses and trees. bottom part, leftmost area, the roof is red hot.
3) weird lighting - in any scene, unless the sky is overcast or at night, one would naturally expect the sky to be the brighest. maybe sometimes depending on directional lighting it is possible for objects in the picture to be as bright (at the very most). here, the bottom most layer of houses are glowing with an unholy light. this does not make sense. this is probably the result of pushing photomatix strength too hard. in hdr, your hierachy of brightness levels should still remain the same. the brighest point should remain the brightest point, the darkest point should remain the darkest point. the in betweens should remain in the same order, just that now the "tonality" is compressed so that you can see more highlight and shadow detail than usual.
4) too much detail, clouds at top part, way too much detail. nice and dramatic, and therefore tempting to reveal all the fine little hairs and tussles but it is way too much. when you look in the sky, even stare it for very long, have you ever seen clouds like that?
5) haloing is when you have a layer of strong "rim lighting" around objects and elements in the picture. you are getting it mainly at the bottom area of the picture here.
as for flash WB, whatever WB you use, you have to tweak photomatix output a little if you want to make it more saturated in the first place. otherwise, suggest stay around 50-60 levels of sat, then tweak channels selectively in photoshop. photomatix tends to saturate various channels at whim when it does the tone mapping.
i suggest you make sure that you are getting the correct input of exposures - the brightest histogram should be bunched to the right, but not so much that it is off the usual scale, the darkest histogram should be bunched to the left but not so much that it is off the scale too. then use about 40-60 strength, 50-60 sat, and adjust the white/black point for maximal detail.. before lowering luminosity by one. this will give you a very malleable, and not too overdone output to play with in photoshop.
no one gets hdr right the first time, but you have to keep trying the tone mapping AND post processing in photoshop. blindly accepting the output from photomatix is a bad idea.
anyways, my typical workflow AFTER photomatix in cs2 -
1) curves (most important)
2) color balance (also important)
3) selective saturation/desaturation (depending on level of saturation in tone mapping photomatix)
4) exposure upped a little, gamma downed a little
5) aggressive USM (slightly more than usual because of photomatix softness)
reason why i ask why your monitor is spoilt is because your other works do not usually exhibit such wantoness.
