This photo of the Charles River near Boston was taken by a friend.

This is the straight jpeg developed from the raw file using Lightroom.

No adjustments were made to the raw file here.
I then created 4 other "bracketed" files in LR by varying the Exposure by 1 stop.
So I ended with files at -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2 exposures.
These were brought into Photomatix to create 2 files: a HDR tone mapped file using
Details Enhancer and a fused file using Exposure Fusion.

These 2 files were combined in Photoshop and adjusted to my liking using a Layer Mask.
Color was enhanced by converting to LAB mode and using a Curves Adjustment Layer changing
the A and B Channels. A great way to enhance colors, by the way.

Converted back to RGB and applied a basic S-curve using a Curves Adjustment Layer.

Continue on to the next image for further explanation.