Newbie - Need photoshop post processing advice

[Airfix]

Hey there. I'm pretty much a brand new dslr photographer on account of a safari we recently took that was the catalyst for me getting my first DSLR camera and figuring out how to use it. Many of my safari pictures require post processing to clean them up and to make the pictures pop. I've gone through several of the pictures already but I think I tend to overdo the post processing making the pictures look less natural.

There are probably about 15 to 20 of my top pictures that I want to spend the time to do a really good job on the post processing and need some input. I'm using photoshop 5.5 and unfortunately I didn't take any of the pictures in raw. A mistake I'll not repeat.

With the subtitle of this site being "a learning community for photographers" I thought this forum would be a good place to start to get some tips, criticism and advice.

For starters here is one of the pictures showing the before and after post processing as well as the steps I took to go from one to the other.



Original - Nikon D7000, AF-S VR Nikkor 30-300mm f4.5-f5.6, 1/320s, f/9, 70mm, ISO 100



My initial work I did by opening it up in camera raw. I adjusted the white balance a little cooler, deepened blacks, reduced the exposure, upped the brightness (did that just undo what I did with exposure), marginally increased contrast, increased clarity (don't know what it did except it looked better), played with tone curves and added some lens vignetting to draw the eye to the subject.


Then I went to photoshop to try and brighten up the subject relative to the frame, bring more detail into the grass in the foreground and sharpen. I reduced the saturation on the yellows to enhance the foreground grass. The last step was a smart sharpen for lens blur 90% amount at 2.0 pixels.



Like I said I seem to go a little overboard messing with stuff and seeing if it looks better than before. I'm looking for input and help on how to improve my post processing work flow.

Thanks

Steve

[Richard Lundberg]

Not much difference except over-sharpened.

[Colin Southern]

It's looking OK here on my iPad.

A trick for more "pop" is to increase the exposure (in Photoshop), and then decrease the brightness. They may appear to counter each other, but they're actually working in different parts of the image; exposure affects everything whilst brightness (old version) is primarily a midtones adjustment.