Thank you for all the critiques.
This was an experimental effort. I got my hands on "Photoshop LAB Colour" by Dan Margulis the other day and after getting through the first chapter I decided to try the recipe on this image.
It promises to be a good book. There is a lot of excess verbiage in the Foreword (by one David Biedny) and in the Introduction - the way they go on and on, it is as if you are about to be lead into the abstruse world of Quantum Field Theory. But I can look past that. Margulis does seem to have a lot of good material in there.