Some post photo PS work, tell me what you think.

[Aerophile]

I know that this does not even come close to the quality of everybody else's photos here, but I still would like your opinions.  I was at DAL flying with a student, so while we were waiting to be refueled I took an opportunity to take some snapshots.  I really wanted this one to work out, but did not turn out as well as I hoped.  I wasn't really aware of backlighting and that sort of stuff at the time.  Anyway, I was messing around in PS and think I found a way to make it a little more presentable.  The first image is the original photo; however, I did crop it, resize it, and smudge out some power lines.  For the second image, after discovering the rendering tool, I added some lighting, ran it through the warming filter, reduced noise, and cropped it a bit tighter.  Well, fire away!

Before


After

[BigTruck]

Isn't photoshop a blast?  The shots look great in my opinion, it's just amazing the stuff you can do with a powerful software like photoshop, I use Photoshop CS2.  The filters and rendering tools are my favorite, and the liquify tool is great fun  :D  

[beaky]

I'm not sure why, but I like the original better. I think the main problem is that it's sort of a lo-res shot to begin with.
But yes, PS is fun... I use the GIMP more often, though, mostly because I'm more familiar with it.