Originally posted by Andrew Faires I'm wondering if my effort is a little too unrealistic or if it's reasonable?
With respect, this is a question that no one can answer except yourself.
Personally, I see no merit in the second picture - I like the first one a lot, and see no point in the changes. But that's just my subjective view, it doesn't have to be yours or anyone else's.
You can play with contrast and saturation in any one of a number of editing applications and produce results that are unrealistic to one extent or another, and different people will like different effects.
Arguing about whether any of these are better or worse seems pointless to me, since people's tastes vary so much.
However, the problem that HDR attempts to solve, not that I'm any kind of expert, seems to me to be that the eye can resolve detail over a much greater dynamic range than the camera. Part of this is probably the fact that as your eye moves over a scene, your spot metering results in a different exposure as your eye moves, so you expose for the bit that you're looking at.
So HDR, AFAIC, should be aiming at making it look natural over a higher dynamic range than is possible with only one exposure, thus allowing you to see detail in the dark bits as well as the bright bits. Anything more than this, as we often see, that just cranks up contrast and saturation, and gives a very punchy final effect that is nevertheless totally unnatural, is not to my taste at all.
But I'm just one voice.