HDR images come out absolutely terrible?!

1. First image does not need HDR

2. you aren't tone mapping it, its not a simple "feed the sytem it will work" process
you have to (if you have photomatix.) move sliders to get what you want
in image 2, its took too much shaddow out the tree and not got bright enough in
the sky.

3. HDR means High dynamic range (The tones have a greater range than normal aka, you can see what is inside shadows whats in the brightest area of the image and all the detail in the mid tones too.

4. by bracketing for +/- 2 you have extremely under and over exposed the image which has lost all its detail meaning it doesn't contain those tones anymore.
sometimes 3 images is not enough, some people use 8, 16 images, in general, 3 should work fine but there will be circumstances where you need pen and paper and set the camera to Program mode and just set metering to spot metering (or partial.) and point to each area where the tone differs greatly (i.e. point to shadow, write down exposure value camera gives you, point to brightest part, write value, point to mid tone, write value, point to any "in between" Tones and write the value.)
for the second image, places to get exposure reading for would be: the tree (set EV To -2/3rds. this exposes green correctly.) the sky (set ev to 0 and point to a blue part.) the water (set to 0 I would presume.) you could also get the exposure for the little bit of yellow grass under the trees.
then you set camera to manual mode and with the exposure values you have written, take the first pic, check it and adjust, repeat for each image until you have all the images correctly exposed
you could go 1 better by setting the EV bracketing for all images to +/-1 (2 is too much.) that way your pretty much guaranteed a good hdr (technically, if there is no wind, nothing moving, stable camera, and stuff like that.) thats 12 exposures all together.
your first image (the first exposure for the first image.) looked fine to me, it had good contrast, angle, colour and enough detail no need to hdr it.
 
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Just do the bracketing manually, that's what I do. At least that way you can choose which exposures you want instead of some arbitrarily pre-set value.

I don't know if it applies to converting jpg's into HDR's as it does for RAW, but make sure you have the right colour space selected on photomatix. It took me ages to work out why my images always looked garbage and it was simply that I had Adobe RGB checked instead of sRGB (which the camera is set to).
Where the the program is this Adobe RGB / sRGB you are referring to?
If you use photoshop
go to
edit > colour setting (or shift+ctrl+k)
top one should say sRGB
 

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