I need to find a way to bring out these colors more, without blowing out the highlights even more. Anyone have any idears?
Working on it now. I won't be able to get rid of the lens flare though. I'd suggest getting a hood or turning the other way.
Here it is. It isn't the greatest quality because you didn't post up the full quality, but this is what i was able to do.
I'm not really seeing all that much of a difference, perhaps if you put the before and after shots side by side. having a hard time scrolling up and down. I can barely make out what's different.
You may be able to just tune up the saturation, but part of the problem is you have areas in extreme dark and areas in extreme light. Likely you're losing a lot of color information in both places. Taking a picture like this in RAW might give you a bit more options to work with... also taking several exposures at different shutter times and making an HDR image (which is basically a composite to deal with extreme lighting situations) might also give you some interesting results. (you can also do this manually, btw... but photoshop and a few other apps do it "automatically") This is a traditionally difficult shot to expose properly so don't let it bother you.
