Gas Works is brutal for that, all those tree lines and the fence silhouettes. The halo thing usually comes down to edge detection on fine detail, so before you swap anything try shooting a clean plate or just pull the hair out with a quick channel mask on the red channel and refine the edges in smaller chunks, like 8 to 10 shots at a time instead of the whole batch. For the fence posts, do the sky on a layer underneath your subject, then mask the posts back in by hand on top with a soft brush at low flow. Six hours on one session happens to all of us, but batching 40 at once is probably where it started going downhill.

Wait, he showed up to a writing group with a draft that had almost no commas at all? That is wild to me. I get what he's saying about not fussing over grammar and just getting the words down, but handing that to other writers takes some guts. Half the people in my old group would have red inked the whole page before he finished reading it out loud. Cutting half your commas later makes sense though, since a lot of them are just clutter you toss in out of habit. I might actually try that on my next rough draft just to see if it loosens things up.