The edited shot by Tim Gray has a weird color cast to it (can't tell what color), which is rather unusual and makes it seem like a painting now. Not sure if this is desired effect, but I would prefer a more natural color and less contrast.
Boomertime1, the bright white border around your original picture somehow distracts the viewer's attention from the less bright waterfall, you might want to consider removing the border or changing it to a different color (black usually works). I like the shot though, it is nicely composed.
In the 2nd one there's way too much contrast. Looks like a movie set and all the detail is blocked up in the shadows. The first one is nice, but with a fairly pronounced green color cast to it. If you used photoshop and went into the adjustments section and played with the color balance sliders you could add some magenta (to remove some green) to the midtones and highlights..
Here is an adjustment that I did by adding 30 points of magenta to the midtones, 10 points of magenta to the highlights and added 10 points of green to the shadows. This increased the contrast while still keeping the nice detail you had in your original image. - z
One of the few advantages Photoshop Elements has over its more expensive cousins is a feature called "color cast". All you have to do is find something you think is white/grey/black, click on it, and it does a very nice correction. It does something more than simply add the complementary color, also. Not sure what it does, but it's a handy little feature for this situation.
