Douro River Estuary Porto 2

OK, so here I am on a Sunday afternoon, playing around with some Pseudo HDR pics. I think this one is probably my best attempt so far. The subject is The Douro River Estuary in Porto, Portugal, the same as my previous two attempts, a beautiful place to visit.

Heres how I went about it.

In the absence of having a bracketed set of photos, I cheated a little by first duplicating the original photo in PS CS5 and after changing the exposure to -2.00 I saved a copy as a jpg.

I then repeated this process another 4 times, saving copies at exposures -1.00, 0.00, +1.00 and +2.00. This gave me a total of 5 copies in all. (3 probably would have done the trick)

I then loaded all 5 copies into Photomatix Pro, tweeked a few settings and that generated an HDR image. I saved that file and continued on to watch and follow a tutorial video for Enhancing HDR shots which can be found here=> [link]

That's it basically, I will continue to learn this process until I am confident of producing good results every time and if anyone can offer this "newbie to HDR" any advice it would be greatly appreciated.

Programmes used:

Photoshop CS5 (64bit)
PhotoMatix Pro (64bit)
Topaz Adjust 4 (64bit)
Topaz DeNoise 4 (64bit)