When I began shooting in RAW format and processing RAW photos in ACR (Adobe Camera RAW), my RAW photos looked dull next to my JPEGs and to what I saw on the back of my camera, and I had a difficult time tweaking them to get them to look "right." Then I discovered camera profiles. By using camera profiles, my RAW photos looked like what I had seen on the back of my camera.
Camera profiles come with ACR 5.2 (and Lightroom 2.0). If you have ACR 4.2 or higher you can download profiles from
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles. To use profiles, open your photo in ACR, click on the camera calibration icon (looks like a camera) in the right panel, and pick the camera profile that works for you. Your photo should look closer to what you originally saw and you will notice your histogram changes as well.
Here is an example. This is a photo I took in RAW. I opened it twice in ACR and saved it as a JPEG twice. Other than sharpening both JPEGs and saving them for the web, the only thing I did did was change the camera profile.
The first time I chose the Adobe Standard profile:
The second time I chose the Camera Standard profile:
While you may prefer the first photo, the second photo (Camera Standard profile) is far closer to what my eye saw and what the back of my camera showed me when I took the photo.
My Picasa photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/superdewa