Help with my Lioness shot please!

I took the shot below yesterday, and I would really welcome some advice on adjusting levels, or curves (or whatever else) within PS to help it not be so flat.

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Hi hows this?
Crop some sky out adjust Levels, add a tough of sat' and contrast..

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Ahh, that's a bit better, what setting did you use, can you quantify them?

Croped 10x8, levels brightened +3, contrast +1, sat' done with sponge tool.

Here's my adjustments. I use adjustment layers so they can be tweaked.
I cropped the sky out & cloned the little light piece above her back. I started with a Levels adjustment and pulled the blacks in (sorry don't have shot of this histogram but you can see the black slider moved inwards), then I did the Curves, Hues/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast adjustments. I finally went back to the Levels adjustment layer and saw I could pull in the whites (this is histogram posted for the levels layer). I didn't sharpen, looks sharp enough for my liking though I'd sharpen a full size file for printing.

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The second pic is a definite improvement, unfortunately it introduced some noise in the background.

You could try masking off the lioness/foreground and applying the levels adjustment just to her, or you could also try masking off the background (in the above edited example), desaturate the colours a bit, lower the levels, and add some gaussian blur.

Thanks for the input guys, and especially Lindsey for taking the time to capture the screen shots. This was one of those difficult shots, taken from inside the car, as the rain was starting to fall, through tinted glass!

I'd adjusted the R G B chanels in DPP to compensate for the window tint, but wasn't sure where to go from there - you've both given me a great starting point. I'll play with it again tonight and repost my modified version.

looking forward to seeing your edit.
I just went through my weekly monitor re-calibration and now see my edit is quite a lot darker than it was originally before the calibration. Just goes to show how much monitors drift in a week.

OK - here's version 2. Comments very welcome.

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Wow! I need those PS skills! What a great result!

yeah lots better....good idea to crop out the sky too

Colin, excellent processing!! You sharpened it to perfection too.
Simply beautiful

Thanks for the encouragement to give it a go. I am rather pleased with the result - time to have a look at the rest of the shots now

Hi Colin

What a beautifully majestic animal, I just thought I would offer my 'take' on this.

Bearing in mind this is done on the web image you posted I did the following - USM LCE settings of 10:25:0 then in Levels I did a simple take of the white point on the chin fur and black point on the shadow/lip area, then used CS2 Smart Sharpen of 40:0.9:0 and lastly a slight crop to lose the sky. (For the record - working with the original image I would leave the Smart Sharpen step until after the final resize for the web, everything else would be done on the "out of camera" original, so to speak).

Here it is

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