1.12.11 Shoot and Edit: - Winters Fragile

Part 2 of Shoot and Edit weekly photo challenge.  A great way to learn and practice you shooting and editing skill.
This week's suggested photo theme was to 1st capture a shot that in some way says "WINTER". 
Do you recall my first SOOC shot that I posted Monday?  If you missed it, here it is once again SOOC -

Here is how I shot this photo I had placed a black piece of cardstock behind the cluster of snowflakes.  By doing so I hoped to eliminate the distractions in the background and help the details in the snowflakes stand out a bit more.
I know just by looking that this is under exposed, aren't snowflakes suppose to be on the white side?  The white and black through my metering out the window.
So here is my editing procedure to help fix up and bring back the snowflakes details.

• Bring the photo into ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) changed the camera profile to vivid
• Set white balance with eyedropper tool selecting what was suppose to be white
• Pulled up the exposure and added in a bit of fill

Here is what the photo looks like now in ACR

There wasn't much more that I could do in ACR so it was not time for Photoshop CS4.

• Crated a duplicate layer (ctrl J) of my background layer.  Ran noise-ware program to get rid of the pixely look in the black areas. Noiseware that I use is a plug in for Photoshop put out by Imagenomics, it's great stuff.
• Rotated image
• Cropped the image to 12x12

The rest can be found by looking at the photo layers file -

• Adjusted color balance
• Adjusted level, pulled the black and white sliders in
• Adjustment Black and White layer
• Adjustment Layer Black to White Gradient Map
• Adjustment Hue/Saturation toned toned down the load colors
• New adjustment layer painted on background color over sun spot
• Adjustment layer levels pulled in the black and white more
• Ran noiseware again
• Added text
• High pass sharpen

All the adjustment layers were added by clicking on the little half black half white ball.
Here is my new after edit photo -

Now let compare all 3 photo one after the othere:

Nikon D90 - 85mm Macro - Manual Mode - CW - Auto WB - f/16 @ 1/25 - 640ISO