This is the original snap shot, captured as a RAW file (thankfully). These photos are cropped so click on each one to load the full photo in its own window.
In Adobe Camera RAW I saved out the original exposure as a TIFF, then played with the exposure sliders until I was happy with one exposure that captured shadow detail and another that captured highlight detail. I saved those out as TIFFs and then loaded them into NIKs HDR Efex Pro where I tonemapped them. The final step was to load the tonemapped file into Photoshop with the varying EV TIFFs and used a mask and a soft brush to clean up some of the HDRness. Yes, that’s a word.
