You lost an awful lot of information in the second, processed image. Dark areas are closed up, and highlights are lost in bright areas.
If I had the original, and it was a raw file, there's a lot I could in the ACR production that comes with PS. Or better yet, with Lightroom 4, perhaps followed by a few tweaks in PS.
But, having only a .png (or .jpg) there are a few quick and dirty techniques that can be applied in PS to get you a pretty good image toot sweet.
In the first image I brought up the shadows and pulled down the bright areas with the Image->Adjustments->Shadows/Highlights. Just tried to pull out detail in the darks, and bright the brights down a bit, didnt' worry too much about overall contrast. Note that I make a copy of your original image in the Layers stack over at the right. Shadows/Highlights is a "destructive" editing technique and should be used sparingly, and you should always back up the original image on a separate layer before using it.
In the second image, I just added a Curves layer above the image to brighten it up a little.
If I wasn't so lazy, I could appled a lot of selection masks, luminance masks etc.
I personally always try to keep as much information as possible that is available from the image. Lots of shadow, lots of highlight detail, etc. There are other aesthetics that will sacrifice that kind of detail for dramatic effect, but that's not to my liking.