Color Flooded Underground

Today's photo proved to be quite a challenge, because, as the title says it, the subject was color flooded. Down in a cave, the only lighting was unnatural, and the cave tour company decided to use gels to flood this area with a particular color. (Actually, they switched gels several times so that there were different colors.) Here is the image that I originally produced:

As you can see, the image is dark and flooded with a mostly pink-purple hue.

When I tried to process it in AuroraHDR, the presets produced... an interesting variety of colors in the image.

Since this wasn't quite what I was looking for, I went back to the drawing board and uploaded my image in Photomatix, with the following result:

Admittedly, I've been working with Photomatix longer than AuroraHDR and am a little bit more... comfortable working in that program (due to familiarity,) but I really like the Photomatix image much better than my AuroraHDR image.

I also processed the image with the Graphic Novel filter (because that's what I like to do) -

And merging together the AuroraHDR and the Photomatix HDR (and doing a little bit of Photoshop editing), I think that this is probably what the color of the cave would have looked like without the gel lights. Thanks for stopping by!