You will never reach KR's level of superior photography skill. No one will. It's just not possible. KR is that good.

Seriously though, please don't start any KR threads. They always lead to people's feelings getting hurt, especially Ken's.

He uses PS and Aperture. Leica's Raw is DNG so it is Photoshop ready. Over saturates various colors, changes the hues, contrast, etc. Most of the "punched" colors I see from him comes only from early morning (just prior to sunrise) or sunset (just after). To get the electric color, you have to wait for the Golden hour.

Leica's are that good at getting sharpness. There is a reason lenses cost $5k new for a 50mm 1.4. His "Pole in Last Light, Morro Bay Harbor" is probably shot at 1.4. Nothing beats a Leica 50mm f/1.4. That is the Gold standard.

Well, if you've read through some of his posts over the past while, he states that he just uses Aperture and the auto-correct function to handle most of the work, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did some tweaks (burning/dodging, saturation etc.), so that's what I would try first. I guess technically you would also need an M9 too if you really wanted to match the look.

But really the most important reason why his colors are so vibrant is that he shoots scenes and objects that are very colorful to begin with. With a scene with muted colors, it's much more difficult to get saturated colors that look plausible.

I generally look at his radiation count web page (OK, so I am a bit of a geek), but I saw that Ken R. has today posted a set of photos he took with his Leica M9 on a tour of central CA.

I have been reviewing some of my recent brightly lit shots and cannot for the life of me (even with the Nikon vivid color settings) see how to get such tack sharp shots with those very over-cooked colors he gets without loss of IQ.

Increasing the sharpness and color saturation in whatever software I use (Capture NX2 Or View NX2 - hey.. this *IS* in the Nikon software part of the forum), to the extent that I end up with the eye-melting amount of color he has, results in some loss of definition/distortion in my images, compared to how they usually are...

Assuming he only uses the Leica software and shoots in raw, compared to the much more realistic Nikon results, the Leica raw to JPG software can't be all that far out, can it?