I'm not the graphic artist that our moderator is, so I just went for a straight-forward approach.
While I'm not perfectly happy with it, here's what I did.
I used PSCS2. Shadow/highlight tool to open the shadows yet prevent the background from blowing out;
a bit of noise ninja; the color sampler tool along with levels to get rid of the yellow color-cast;
a touch of saturation and a touch of sharpening, which I think I should not have done as it would look smoother.