This is a great photo of an exceptional landscape… your treatment of the three combined exposures in HDR has worked well to emphasise every cutting detail in that cliff face. What I think you need to do with this image though, is use light to tell more of the story.
Have a look at this image for a moment… cliff face and waterfall aside, what do you notice? As I look at this photo I see a overcast sky with spots of sunlight breaking through the clouds and lighting up those trees… that’s where I want to be going. To get our interest down there we need to do two things. Darken the sky and then brighten up that foreground.
There are a few ways of darkening the sky and my preference would be to do this in the RAW converter, using the adjustment brush, prior to running the RAW files through the HDR converter. What I did in this instance was to select the sky and then use the Shadow / Highlight tool to darken the sky.
As for the trees, I simply used the lasso tool with the feather option set to about 50 pixels to loosely wrap a selection about them and then I used a Curves adjustment layer to brighten that area of the picture.
The result of doing
all this is that our eyes no longer want to look up towards the sky, rather they
now want to dwell in the trees… and when we do look upwards we are rewarded
with that beautiful backdrop. Well done.
As for the fringing halo you mention, at a guess I would say this has a lot to do with either the Detail control in the HDR engine you are using, or the Edge Glow control. Most HDR programs emphasis the contrast in the photo by accentuating the light and dark areas of a picture... and sometimes a halo can appear as a result of this.
One technique you could use with this image is to treat the sky seperately from the rest of the photograph. Go ahead and make the HDR image as you did before, but then reopen the darkest of the three original photographs from your HDR and copy that sky back into the HDR composite. Use a mask to ensure that the trees and the top of the cliff blend together well with the sky and then flatten the image and save.
Good effort... Image Doctor
Yosemite Falls - Image Doctor's edited version
