Fort Pilar Shrine

This Shrine is located outside Fort Pilar in Zamboanga City, Philippines. It was erected by the Spaniards when they came to the Philippines. People say that this shrine actually grows higher and higher year after year. I have seen a very old photo of it inside the museum and it really was significantly shorter than how it currently is, probably only over 15 feet tall. Whether it's true or not is probably best left a mystery.

Read more about Fort Pilar on Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Pilar

This image is my attempt at making better images through post processing. You can read about the challenge here. Original photo can be found here.

Here is my workflow.

Lightroom:
adjusted white balance
adjusted tone settings (exposure, recovery, fill light, blacks, curve saturation)
increased sharpness
cropped image

Photoshop:
[layer4] background duplicate set to soft light mode, around 15% opacity.
[layer3] background duplicate set to overlay mode, around 15% opacity.
[layer2] curve adjustment, mask for clouds. white point set to lightest area
[layer1] curve adjustment, mask excluding clouds. white point set to one of the flowers and black point set to one of the dark corners on the lower left area. s-shaped curve for increased contrast
[background] imported from RAW with Lightroom 2 adjustments

did some image manipulation for bloom + tilt-shift effect