OK, First, I tried in photoshop, you friend, auto-levels. This stretches the dark and light areas to fit uniformly across the image, which, while makes them image contain the same information (number of values) according to the computer, each value is displayed further apart (from light to dark) giving us the ability (without our eyes) to see more clearly.
Now, because the bright sparkly thing is so much more contrasting than the rest (why the camera did such a crap job!) the auto levels will not 'cut off' information. We do not want to the sparkly white thing, so I blacked it out (using a nearby colour) and then auto levels. Wow, noisy but better [output 1].
I can do better, so using levels, I manually adjusted the levels, evenly, then modified the brightness contrast, and did localised touchups, [output 2].
If anyone needs more info, i'll see, but if you take digital camera images, don't rely on internet processing, at ***LEAST*** see if it looks better with auto levels applied.
