I’m going to get all critical; please don’t get upset with me! All that follows is personal opinion, of course.
It’s a nice scene with a touch of menace, with the contrast between death and life as a theme, foreground-to-background. Both renders (was it shot RAW?) are much too contrasty IMO, with inky shadows, particularly in the dead stumps. And I find the colour version, which I also prefer, way too saturated—the blues in the BG are especially distracting. Is there any more sky available? I find the top of the frame a bit
heavy. And a small amount of vignetting would concentrate the foreground—I use Capture One’s vignetting tool a lot; it can be used quite subtly.
Re the contrast, I open up shadows with C1’s Shadow HDR tool in just about
every processed image from my a7 and Olympus E-M5, unlike with my seldom-used-any-more Leaf back.
I’d like to see a mono reworking of the image with some
silvery mid-tones …
Hope you find this POV of some use.
[
and is your monitor calibrated?]