Well for one I meter and expose for my subject in camera. In post-processing in LR I usually bump the vibrancy to 20-25 and reduce whites to -20 for the snow which subsequently has me boosting darks under my curves. When I am in PS I also duplicate the image and throw the multiply effect on that duplicate layer and erase around my subject to make a "spotlight" and reduce the opacity of that layer to make it not-so-obvious as a vignette as opposed to black vignetting...
sounds very familiar.!


















