Lightened or Cropped Pictures

This is my original picture from the Time of Day assignment.

And this next picture is one I lightened up a little bit using Picasa.

I tried a couple of different things to lighten up the picture a bit and still keep the quality, but what ended up working best for me was to saturate the picture and put a glow in the skyline closer to the trees. The effects of the saturation made the cars in the parking lot show up where they didn't previously.

The next two pictures are from my parents backyard. I took these pictures for the Rule of Three assignment. I cropped out their neighbors house and a good portion of their yard because I wanted to accentuate the plants (flowers, tree, hill/yard) as the focus points of the picture.