Lately I've been capturing a lot of shots with a mind to use HDR and tone mapping to get the sky and foreground looking balanced without having the problem of filters making trees and chimneys dark.
Here's a shot of Leeds town hall - it's an "average" HDR, a lot to work with, but ultimately, it needs more UMPH!
I use photomatix to do the mapping, it's fairly hit and miss really, and getting that "real" feel is very tricky to get right. The main thing to bear in mind is that light smoothing is your friend. All those cartoon like shots you see will have lightsmoothing at around 0 or lower. I usually have it a about 1 or even a super-smooth 2.
The thing is that after you've done that, things become a little wishy washy, edges don'e seem to strong etc.
Don't panic, you can rescue it in Photoshop.
I tend to duplicate the washy layer, then run a filter on it (or somne adjustment layers even) to get an uber-contrasty shot. Usually mono or sepia too. Then I merge all layers to 2 layers - the original background and all the new stuff on a second layer.
The intricate bit is to now play with the blending modes between the layers, then fade the second layer in/out to get teh feel you're after.
So from the shot I started with I played around with transformd and skew to get the verticals more impressive and got the result to the right.
It's not dodge/burh, but layer blending you shuld try - d+b leaves edges and nasty thing like that, it can be obvious.
Use the Gradient tool on layer masks to subley change things.
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