Yes. The hard part is telling when to quit beating the horse and start applying the lipstick to the next pig...
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I consider my RAW images to be just raw material upon which to work. Sometimes the concept is there but things just don't quite gel, the effect is not quite right and one knows it even though others may praise the work. In my case, it's possibly just a matter of not having enough skill in Photoshop to get the effect I want.
Someone made the point recently on the forum that light and shade is more important than the subject. Whatever one's views on this, there's no doubt that the interplay of light and shade, contrast and detail, is crucial to the success of many images.
Alain's recent essay, 'The Eye and the Camera' has some good examples of straight RAW conversions transformed from rather dull and flat images into vibrant images. It is the skill to do this that I personally feel I need to develop, hence my interest in and use of (the no longer available) RawShooter which seemed to be able to add zap, vibrancy and detail to an image in a way that seemed more difficult to achieve with ACR and PS.
I would hesitate to comment on your image viewed on an internet cafe monitor, but it sure looks an impressive tree, enhanced by the use of a wide-angle lens, with an almost semi-abstract quality of shape and form.
