This image began with the end result of the "Just a Few Tweaks"

I cannot remember all that I did, but the main thing I did that appeared to increase the contrast is a technique I learned back in the film days, (but never perfected, and spent too much money trying to get it to work with results that I could reliably count on... Increasing the color saturation.

For Night pics of city scenes with multiple sources of light each with their own color temp, and all the neon and florescent lights colored to attract and do whatever else they do... doing this has a better effect than actually increasing just the contrast! (experiment with it some time) I then put the image through the PhotoImpact "FOCUS" thing, (a sort of simple sharpen/blur tool that perhaps has some other algorithms happening that work just a bit different than the other related tools.

I probably did other things, but did not remember. I started out changing this pic to try to push it over the edge of reason. but as I did, the pic started looking like pics I've seen published in mags and posters often wondering how the effect was created. (and now that I did it, I am not completely sure if I did anything more than I described)