Water Dragon photo, needs help to improve

[hughosborn]

How's it going. I'm new here and also at photography so I'm limited with lenses and skills etc. I've got a photo of a Water Dragon (Physignathus leseurii) which I took in Brisbane, Australia but it doesn't stand out as much as I was hoping due to a contrasty background and not a great depth of field due to the short focal length of my lens and I couldn't get too much closer without it running away. I have never used editing software and I think I have Adobe Photoshop CS as well as Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I was just wondering what people here would recommend for me to do to improve the image, such as where and how you'd crop, and other things to make the actual animal stand out more as I'd like a cool photo of a water dragon to stick on my wall as motivation. If anyone is keen to fix it up that would be nice as well cause my skills are non-existent. Not sure what happens here when I post. Should I make the picture smaller for here? I'll attach a reduced size picture, if you want the big one to muck around with let me know and i'll send it to you. haha. Anyway, awesome, thanks.

Hugh

[Has He Lost His Mind?]

Cropped for my tastes.
I used the Velvia effect, (a PS action) dodged the water dragon to brighten it up, and burned the ferns on the right.

[hughosborn]

Hey thanks mate, that looks really sweet. This is a really friendly site, it's great to see. I will have a go at it myself with your suggestions. Cheers Hugh. Oh and anyone else please tell me what you think of this sweet assed water dragon. thanks

[Has He Lost His Mind?]

Velvia tutorial

[hughosborn]

Hey thanks for posting the tutorial link there for me. It was very helpful and that Velvia you suggested really brightened up the colours. I also like the crop you've chosen, it all looks good. Much improved. Thanks again

[Has He Lost His Mind?]

No problem.

[hughosborn]

Hey I've been mucking around still but can't figure out how to just darken one section of the photo ie. the over exposed ferns, just to bring down the glariness of that section. I mean i figured out that to dodge and burn means to brighten dark areas or darken bright areas, but if you just want to target one area which is really super bright is the hand held tool the only option cause that seems so dodgey?

Anyway I tried a crop about the length of the suggested one but with the dragon in the centre so there's less of that glare. It looks alright. I've used the Velvia effect tutorial and the digital flash tutorial from that site which was linked above. It doesn't look too bad but I just wanted to know how to get rid of highlights a bit in certain areas. Thanks in advance for anyone who reads this.

Also I tried resizing with image size. I put 640mm as width, which they want and low image quality though when i tried to upload it says it is a larger picture like 1814 x 1009. what measurements are they using for the upload?