Playing With Images - Follow Up

Last Tuesday I posted on image manipulation after I'd photographed a weather front coming across the country.  Various comments indicated a divergence of views on the results and Adrian offered to give a lesson in the techniques involved in achieving various results.  He subsequently posted a tutorial and the results on his blog Seeing to Pictures. 

The original image he used was 

and the final result was:

Adrian made the point "I have exaggerated the editing but for folk to see a difference I have to".

Playing With Images

Last evening the weather front came across from the Ranges to the West of Hawkes Bay.  As the front moved towards here I decided to photograph it.  (Now there's a surprise!).  However when I looked at the photo it was rather poor.  OK I'm still not quite sure why it was slightly out of focus.  I think I'd left the camera on manual focus when I changed from automatic.  The result was:

Please ignore the focus because this is actually about manipulation.  I'd bracketed the exposures and the above was the middle exposure unadulterated from the camera.  So I decided to adjust the shadows slightly in iPhoto with what I would accept for myself as showing you what I wanted to show ie the weather front:

However as I had bracketed the exposures I decided to unleash Photomatix on it with the following result:

Hmmm.  I'm not sure about that if for no other reason that the front has lost its foreboding darkness.  But at least it's a start.