This is quite similar to a shot I posted back in May, but I've posted this one too as I've been experimenting with an alternative RAW processor: Iridient Developer. It's a programme I've had for quite a few years but as Camera RAW improved I've used it less and less. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I downloaded the new version recently and thought I'd give it another try.

It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Camera RAW but there are two things I especially like. First, it has the best curves tool I've ever used, with a single dialog that allows you to edit eight separate curves: RGB, Red, Green, Blue, Lightness, Chroma (ab), a* and b*. In other words, it combines RGB and Lab Color into a single curve, so for this image I was able to use the Lightness curve for contrast and the a* curve for tone, but didn't need to convert to Lab Color first.

Second, it has some great sharpening routines: Unsharp Mask, Hybrid Sharpen, which "uses a combination of low pass/high pass image convolution filters" - and I'm not sure what that means, but it works well - DoG, which "uses the Difference of Gaussians algorithm" (and I don't know what that means either), and my favourite R-L (Richardson-Lucy) Deconvolution which was a sharpening method that was developed to counteract the problems with the initial images from the Hubble Space telescope.

It also has a range of interesting black and white conversion methods: CIELab Lightness, Luma, Desaturate, Intensity, Custom Tone, Channel Mixer and RAW Color Channel Mixer. None of these are quite as flexible as Camera RAW, but they do produce good results.

The bad news is that this is a Mac only product, but the good news is that it's cheap ($75) and you can also download a demo version. If you're a Mac user I'd definitely suggest you give it a try.