"You said NOTHING about the blending keeping the falls in check while maintining light in the rest of the picture."

The light levels of the falls and the rest of the picture do look good. And its not that I don't like your normal processing, because I've seen enough of your images on this forum, and I hadn't ever really thought them to be overdone before. Perhaps its cause your starting point is a bit more in line than mine? This wasn't one of my better images either, it just happened to be the one I tried following the blend article with.

The original question was "Am I on the right track?" After seeing the your image, I am not. I could probably go at it with my old method of painting on the mask layers with the processing for that part of the image I want and get more correct lighting, but because of what I've seen from you, I thought this method would be better. One of my glaring weaknesses in attempting your way is I have very little skill when it comes to messing around with the color curves, and it seemed that is how you were doing the lighting adjustments.