In scenes like this, with a large scene dynamic range, you are bound to come across issues related to contrast. In your scene, you have very deep shadows in the rocks in the foreground and shading the hills in the middle ground. The sky is somewhat featureless, which gives you a little more room to exercise your edits - you do not have to worry so much about highlight compression.
The editing strategy for me is a trade-off between global contrast and local contrast. The tendency is to lift the shadows to reveal detail that is in the shadow tones, instead of leaving large areas of blocked up shadows. When you do this - and there are many ways to do this - you are decreasing the global contrast of the image. This will leave the image looking flat, as you have observed.
To restore form to this flat version of the image, you apply local contrast - as if you went into a very specific area (like the rocks in the foreground) and made a "S" curves adjustment just for the local tonal range in the now opened shadows in the rocks. The addition of local contrast will re-establish the form and three-dimensionality of the structures, but you will be able to see more detail because of the initial decrease in global contrast.
In essence you are redistributing the contrast in the image - when you do this, some tones must suffer decreased contrast. With the right tools, however, you can get very fine control over where (highlights, mid tones, shadows) contrast is re-distributed and at what scale local contrast is applied (small, medium or large features). In this way, you can optimize your capture so that the tonal compression you use on a global scale is balanced with the local contrast you apply to bring back form and detail.
"Clarity" in Lightroom/ACR and other raw converters is a local contrast tool - but a very blunt tool that you have little control over. Topaz Labs Clarity, or their Detail 3 application, permits you to control the tonal range and detail size that you are boosting with local contrast. This gives you fine control over how you resculpt the details in your image, without introducing halos and other artifacts.
I also tend to apply a light layer of HiRaLoAm (High Radius Low Amount) USM to the image - it reestablishes very large areas of contrast (the large shadow area in the right side of your image, falling across the hillside, for example) that might get washed out from the initial lifting of shadows. These large areas of shadow and highlight do not need a lot of presence, but adding them back in small amounts gives the image's large scale features a little more form.
kirk
