Hi Jake, beautiful snow on trees...however;the stairs are too dark..don't know photo shop too much but..have you tried this using your "flash". sometimes this is all you need....keep going til you get this right..it is worth saving..

yeah is not to bad the black and white detail could of been a bit more clear

It looks like you were playing with high contrast work. I like the effect you got here, but if you'd boosted the gamma as you raised the contrast you may have been able to preserve the detail as you raised the contrast. This is always a delicate balance, and I've found that for me it's easier to shoot my photos in RAW format (if possible), and do all my contrast work while "developing" the image into a jpg (which is a lot easier than it sounds) using RAWShooter or some similar program. Thus you can work with the data off the CCD before the jpg conversion process discards so much data. If you want to see an example of this, my recent "City Guard" image is one in which I did my contrast work before getting to Paintshop. The image has a really low c-index, but it's a good example of manipulation in the RAW stage.