It looks to me like you have very flat lighting, with no contrast on the dog - where are the shadows? Lack of contrast leads to a lack of punch and an apparent lack of sharpness as well. For living things it is always good to have a sparkle in the eyes as well. Given the circumstances your exposure looks good to me. Who cares about the small blown areas in the backgroun? They do not add anything to the scene and are not important. Just clone over them.
If you want punch then you need punchy lighting and good contrast. A good exposure, with low ISO, helps, but the quality of the light is what counts.
Shoot in flat light and you get flat looking photos....
Put some life into your lighting (just sunlight) and things begin to pop....
Both examples are without edits.
How did you add the contrast and sharpen that? I always find it very difficult to get normal daylight shots to look sharp and punchy too.
When I use curves I make a broad 'S' shape, but the problem with that is the blacks then become too black and all the shadow merges in to one, do it less and it doesn't have contrast. I've also tried the unsharpen trick, and it works a bit better, but I still don't get the "punch".
I made my changes in Lightroom, but having deleted the file I no long have the history of edits. What I can say is that I never use the curves tool. I always use exposure/recovery/fill/blacks as necessary and sometimes brightness/contrast too. I may have thrown in some clarity as well, and possibly a little vibrance. For this shot I think I added some localised sharpening to the dog and some localised softening to the background. I also made a hue adjustment to make the grass a bit less green and slide it towards yellow a little. Oh, and probably the first thing I did was to warm it up with a WB tweak. Obviously I cropped a lot tighter to remove the distractions in the background and make more of a feature of the dog, creating more of a "portrait" feel to it rather than simply a dog in the park type thing.
To be honest (and using the Alsatian as an example again
as its a gorgeous looking dog )
I get into all sorts of crap with "curves"
preferring to use (CS3) shadows and highlights and "match colour" for a bit more luminance.
USM I find is the best sharpening tool radius 1Px, threshold 0%,
and amount "to suit your needs"
I made my changes in Lightroom, but having deleted the file I no long have the history of edits. What I can say is that I never use the curves tool. I always use exposure/recovery/fill/blacks as necessary and sometimes brightness/contrast too. I may have thrown in some clarity as well, and possibly a little vibrance. For this shot I think I added some localised sharpening to the dog and some localised softening to the background. I also made a hue adjustment to make the grass a bit less green and slide it towards yellow a little. Oh, and probably the first thing I did was to warm it up with a WB tweak. Obviously I cropped a lot tighter to remove the distractions in the background and make more of a feature of the dog, creating more of a "portrait" feel to it rather than simply a dog in the park type thing.
Since I can't remember exactly what I did, I had another go from scratch.....
Original, with crop applied...
Adjusted version as now with new edits(left), and previously as included earlier(right)....
The grass is looking better in this newer version. I should have cloned out that bright bit top right, but never mind.
Adjustment history (read from the bottom, up)....
The dust spot adjustments were simply an attempt to brighten the catchlights in the eyes.
HTH,
Tim.
