Here is my interpretation: Set white balance toward warmer colors but keep the blue color in the ice. Do some contrast enhancement (sky, reflections on the water) with tone curves. Do some sharpening and structure enhancements (highpass, equalizer). Increase the reds in the sky and water (tone curve). Try to recover the burned areas in the sky (highlight reconstruction with color reconstruction). Make ice brighter (color zones). Crop so that the animals look a little larger and the birds are on the left.
The colors look now “interesting” with the blue ice and the warm sky. How was the impression to the naked eye?
Thanks for the very warm welcome @shreedhar! Your comments and descriptions are very helpful, I’ll take a closer look on your steps over the weekend - thank you!
The unadorned image had vignetting in the corners, so I started with a crop. I didn’t mess with white balance because the bluish tint gives the feeling of “Cold”…
A curve was the next operation; blacks weren’t at black, so I scooched the lower control point over to put them near 0. I put in another couple of points to make an “s” curve to increase the contrast.
I sharpened the full-sized image (I don’t normally do this) to put some “sparkle” in the ice.
A bit of saturation because I love the blue colors that come out of ice.
Resize for posting and my standard post-resize minimal sharpen.
In trying to simplify my workflow above, I go with @msd way of recovering highlights in DT, and his inverted graduated density to pop the foreground. I also replaced wavelet sharpening in gimp by the highpass filter. So, I’m only DT now.