What camera do you use? My friend has a Canon XT and just recently started messing with the settings to get more vibrant images, after he compared mine to his. What we discovered was that turning up the image done and saturation a little dramatically improves the images.
For the longest time my image tone was on the basic setting. After switching to vibrant I wont go back.
As far as that image, boosted saturation and contrast will help get that effect, and then counter the brightening with level adjsutment.