Maybe something like this? To bring out the contrast I have solely tweaked the settings in the Shadow/Highlight dialog (Photoshop CS2). The shadow controls were left untoutched (amount 0), while the highlight controls were set to the following values: amount - 55%, tonal width - 50%, radius - 20px. In the Adjustments controls of the same dialog I also set midtone contrast to 10%. With these adjustments the end result doesn't look as "flat" while the contrast between the white smoke and the darker background is still brought out quite strongly. I also made some small adjustments in the channel mixer to remove the slight yellow/green cast that resulted from the shadow/highlight treatment. Hope this was somewhere close to the kind of assistance you wanted...