No doubt you could get results worthy of enlarging if you were starting from a higher resolution image. One of the great strengths of photography is that an image often has enough information to reward exploring small parts of it. Aside from the sheer pleasure of seeing all the details, one can exercise one’s artistic impulse by locating an infinity of possible subjects within the original.

I share your taste for the simple, but also am attracted to the more complex. Even my original is a detail view of a much more complex scene.

You’ve made good use of the powerful tool of selective darkening and lightening, like the old photographer’s techniques of dodging and burning. I haven’t done this yet with any of the versions I presented, but it’s often necessary to get the “best” expression.

This is a roundabout way of doing things I admit.

Here’s what I did. First, I made the fewest possible changes. Comparing this post with your image below it appears that I merely cropped out a piece. I have a fondness for simplified compositions and decided to go for a limited section.

I kept the overall tonalities and opted to use sharpen to highlight edges, gradient to darken the lower right and brush in a gentled-down mode to lighten and darken where it seemed appropriate. You will notice that a lot of detail has been washed out. Again, the end result does not differ that much, but has come to look more like a painting.

I had to keep it small as any enlargement leads to a mushy look.