Digital darkroom power

I'm shooting digital since the end of the 90'ies but i'm still amazed by the power of the digital darkroom.
I'm writting this post in front of two fresh prints of the images posted here. Nobody could tell how much these photos were processed. They both come from the same raw files and just differ by the post processing.

A little more :
At the begining were 5 exposures from the same frame with one EV increment between each. I converted them to 5 tif files and then blended theses new images using several masks to obtain the photo shown on the top of this article.
The bottom photo is just a variation of the above one.
I've re-processed the first resulting image to obtain 3 new tifs simulating 3 exposures (still 1 EV increment). Once more i used masks (geometric, brush, tones) to blend these 3 new tifs into a new one to which i finally applied some little tones and colors tweaks ...

Of course, the first image looks very more natural than the second one but i'm not sure about the one i'll hang on my wall...