In my experience, it helps quite a bit to clean up one's photos a bit with Photoshop or GIMP...

It appears I can't post a picture in here, but I uploaded my "cleaned up" version of your first pic above here:

Put the two in a folder together, then go back and forth between them and you'll see. Without doing all that much, one can remove the fogginess that tends to hang over photos fresh from the camera.

Edit: Ah, I see - when I put in the image URL, the software here automatically shows the picture. :-)