Thanks again. I picked up the technique a few years ago and recorded most of it as a Photoshop action (some parts of the process can't be automated), then I promptly forgot the whys & whats of what is actually going on. You're making a conversion from RGB to Lab Color and essentially unsharpening the highlights and nothing else so it really pops, but it doesn't look like someone just rolled the sharpening slider up too far. Then you convert back to RGB. After that I do some curve adjustments and maybe monkey with a luminosity mask and then call it a day.
By the way, I don't know if you remember me picking your brain earlier this year about Lightroom but I totally get it now and I won't work without it. So the whole process is some tweaking in Lightroom, then the Photoshop steps I just described.
Do you have a standard recipe? I'd be interested to hear about your process.