Photo tricks revealed

Here is a photo I took of the Grand Canyon. The photo was saved as a Camera Raw image which preserves all of the information from the digital sensor but is similar to having an undeveloped film image.

The sky could have been better, but it was snowing at the time. Here is what the photo looks like after a little work in Adobe's Camera Raw:

 Whether you like the first or second image better might be a matter or taste, but the second image is more of my vision of what the Canyon should look like. By the way, once you use Photoshop for a while, you will never trust the fidelity of an "original" photograph again.