@gadolf I like your v4. Much improved!
@shreedhar The building is a bit low in the valley to notice. Maybe it has to do with the panorama; it doesn’t have much height to it. You might need a few more anchors to draw my attention toward the bottom.
@age As always, I enjoy the simplicity.
@shreedhar kind of a mystical vision… and only now I realize that your yellow buiding seems to be a church… instigating, thanks.
thanks to all, guys.
since this is my first time playing raw, I’d like to wrap up by saying that it’s uncanny to see images shot by me, worked by me till exhaustion, bringing visions completely different from mine, still visions. Not to say about valuable technical advice to be digested and applied in future experiences.
I don’t think this thread is anywhere near done!
Import the EV -1 exposures into darktable and apply this sidecar to all three files: CRW_3486.DNG.xmp (4.7 KB)
Take it into hugin, stitch, then back into darktable where this is the sidecar: CRW_3488 - CRW_3494.tif.xmp (7.7 KB)
Yeah! I noticed that cross on its roof now!
In India, places of worships are usually at the highest topographical point so that they are prominently seen. Strange choice of location here. 
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@agriggio @shreedhar @Morgan_Hardwood If you don’t mind (and still have the files), I would like to have a look at your settings.
Mine are deleted.
@agriggio I loaded you settings just now and I’m studying them, thanks.
Questions:
I had to crop the edges of each HDRmerge stack to obtain a halfway decent Hugin pano. Then a film simulation in RawTherapee.
CRW_3486-3488 - CRW_3492-3494.tif.pp3 (11.9 KB)
I blended some of pat’s film simulations in GIMP, but I don’t remember the exact recipe unfortunately.
I used this processing in RT5.4 and exported the 3488, 3491, 3494 files.
CRW_3488.tif.out.pp3 (11.0 KB)
Then stitched them using the Image Composite Editor (You can also do it through GIMP) and loaded panorama in GIMP. In GIMP I processed it to taste. I remember increasing the saturation a bit, darkening the sky a bit. In the end I just put rectangular selection around the Church, and brightened that part using the Levels tool and then inverted this small selection and darkened the rest of the photo. I noticed that the panorama had some artifacts in the clouds so using the clone tool removed them. That’s about it.
Your version is very good. The details one can see (in your version) are mind boggling!
Thanks for the photo. It was nice to work on it. Can you tell us which city is this? In fact, it might be better if you put the name of the city in the title itself.
My take. I also only used a single exposure per shot. Preprocessed in darktable for demosaicing and color denoising, then stitchted in Hugin and modified afterwards in darktable.
Rio de Janeiro, this is the exact spot from where I took the shots:
I think I won’t change the title, let it mark my first.
@paperdigits You got the most natural one, followed closely by @Thanatomanic, @agriggio and @age. 
These are the colors that I usually see in there, your sky is not so contrasting as mine, and it’s much closer to what it was at time of shooting.
If you zoom in the trees on ths slope at left, or the balcony at right, you can see halos.
By using the EV -1, you probably got much noise, which required strong denoising and sharpening, right?
Yes, I applied a fair amount of denoise. I probably under sharpened just a touch to keep it looking natural.
Put it on a tripod with a pano head to get rid of the halos 
I started using hdrmerge, as it seems the tool everyone uses for hdr, and, by increasing the Mask Blur Radius from the default of 3 pixels to 10, I could almost get rid of those artifacts:
