So a friend of mine likened me to Gambit for some odd reason, but I kind of liked it. He used the image below and popped it into a Sig for me, but it was just too flat. I wanted to take the image myself and make it pop a little more but each time i screw with it I fail horribly.

this is the sig he made for me:



and this is the original image:



removing the lettering is cake, and adjusting the contrast/saturation/etc is easy...

but for some reason everytime i am playing with it im not content, and his version was just too flat in my opinion. I was hoping someone could help kind of give me a tutorial on what to do to make this image pop a little more. I plan on putting it into the sig template he used, so it will be a smaller image like the first one, but the things im trying to accomplish (if anyone can help show me how) are:

1) I would like to put a cool glow around the cards like he did to one of them, maybe not all of the cards, but at least a couple. but i'd like the glow to pop more than his.

2) id like to make just the cards and gambit stand out more from the background, so pretty much pull them out of the image and darken just the background.

and

3) in the image he made for me, gambit's red eyes are gone which i personally think are badass so i'd like to not have those go away.

not too much, just small stuff that i cant figure out for the life of me. also any other cool idea/suggestions that u think might be fun with the image.