Tulips (Before & After)

I was working on tomorrow’s post, when I had to revisit some of my early HDR images looking for the first one. Well, I came a long way. One particularly drew my attention, as I saw a quick fix to the most irritating shortcomings. This is the image I originally posted in February of 2009. Wrong white balance, not the best crop and not well-lit front-to-camera side of the flowers. I thought of those three things instantaneously, and decided to re-do it. From scratch. Although, I soon discovered, the one thing which was well done on the original HDR was defringe, which I struggled a little bit by tone-mapping it differently this time.

Do you agree, that the re-processed image looks better? What would you have done differently?