[robski]

Christine what am I being blamed for now
What is it they say ? You should of gone to spec savers

Stephen I think you have made a decent job of adjusting your image.

I have dabbled with this sort of thing in the past trying to merge images but never got anything to be happy with. I sort of came to the conclusion that this works best on images that have very little detail in part of the tonal range and you can effectively snip a bit out and pull the two ends towards the middle. See below.

Looking at your histograms of before and after seems to confirm this.

With other images and I think Christine's may fall into that catagory is the tonal compression often seems to leave parts of the scene unnaturally lit.

1) before
2) after