I'm going to speak entirely off the cuff here, with my limited knowledge of layers, filters, and other instruments of digital imaging software (note, I know a lot less about HDR than you do, but I'm familiar with it). Feel free to put me in my place if I don't seem to know what I'm talking about. ;)

I can see where you're coming from regarding your last point (a month later, you re-judge your work). My first response was "beautiful, must fave!" Then I read your description and looked more closely. The blur effect is useful, but I think it's applied indiscriminately in this piece. For instance, look at the branches that are not in sunlight but have sunlight in their neighborhood -- they're blurry. If I was in a forest, looking at this scene, I don't think they'd be blurry, even if there was a 'haze' around the lit areas.

I think what might be interesting to do would be to create a variable gaussian blur that scales based on brightness. I believe this could feasibly be done with a "map" and the right software. In the absence of expertise, it might require hand-painting of that map, which would be complex in this piece, but the net effect would be more blur/haze where the sunlight is landing, and less so everywhere else.

Also consider that haze, natural haze, serves to quickly diminish detail with distance, quicker than a clear atmosphere. So all the foreground elements of this piece should be pretty well in focus and not very hazy. Perhaps you can erase the pieces of the haze layer only where the foreground elements are (the big branch at the top, the details flanking the riverbed, etc). I would work on a copy of that layer (with the other invisible of course), and use a broad airbrush eraser with low density to gradually build up the clarity of those near-ground elements.

Hi! Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

I really like your idea of varying the gaussian radius by brightness. I think you're right, it would lead to a lot more of a natural effect. I'll have to look around and see if I can come up with a way to do that.

I masked out the blur layer in some regions, but I did it with a very broad soft brush for regional effects, as opposed to detailed brushing that I think is your suggestion. I think that would be per image. In this woodsy scene I was going for a bit of a hazy, mystical appearance, so I did let mid tones blur out as well. I dunno, I'll keep playing with it.

Anyway, thanks again for your feedback! :)

My pleasure! I'll keep an eye out for future posts, for sure. If I happen across any Photoshop experts who might know a way to script that gausian variable radius thing, I'll letcha know. I'm sure it's possible, but it's deep. I suppose it's feasible someone may have already created such a filter. Hmm.

Out of curiosity, what version & what software are you using?

In general I use Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 for stuff. For HDRs, there's a single step of the process -- actually building the HDR -- that I do in Photomatix Pro.

There's a lot of HDR tools out there, someone's bound to have built one to do this. Just got to find it.