Some sorta flower my daughter named 'em "giggle flowers."

I’ve been thinking lately about the quality of my pictures.  The quality is sure going up, and that’s a good thing – I hate spending time on post production. On the other hand, there are always decent photos that are just missing a little something – maybe flat, or the background doesn’t stand apart, or not fully sharp.

Take the photo to the right: in the original (not shown here), the photo is pretty dull.  Low contrast, not terribly interesting, and fairly dull colors.  The greens were good, but nothing really stood out.  Minor tweaks in Adobe RAW helped (as usual), but didn’t really solve the entire problem.

In the end, I had to pull the entire thing into photoshop and use NIK’s Viveza to breath life into it.  Look at the pic in the large view & you’ll see.