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.
