Before/After "The Path"

This one is my most recent and one of my favourite shots at present.
I aimed a dreamy style which ought to create a fable-like feeling in the viewer.
Another point I wanted to put in was the walking alone concept.
I like it to make the viewers think about their lifes and I believe this kind of images achieve exactly this effect.

To create this dark effect I used HDR Imaging as in the majority of cases.
After this I had to blur the sky because there were dirty dots visible which resulted from the high aperture of f/29.
In this setting every little dust particle on the sensor shows up on the finished image.

After blurring the sky I increased the contrast, strengthened the green color of the grit and darkened the whole image with the help of an adjustment layer "curves".

The whole postprocessing lasted more than a hour and at the end of this I cropped and framed the image to enhance the effect.
It worked out in my opinion.

I think thats it for the moment.
Thanks to you all for the feedback!