GIMP: Increase vividness of photos

Often, I find my point-and-shoot nikon camera takes less than stellar photos. No doubt it is because I am not a skilled photographer, but hey, isn't that what post processing is for? While I can't fix a horrible photo yet, I can definitely increase the vividness of the picture, breathing some much needed life into it so that I can judge whether it's worth working on.

I picked a photo I took a long time ago, just testing out my camera. It's pretty basic and rough. There's a lot that I could do with the photo, but for now, here it is.

The steps to accomplishing this are:

• Open photo as layers.
• Layers window > Create duplicate layer
• Set new duplicate mode to OVERLAY

And that is it, the photo is more vivid. Easy as pie! I think I would do this step after color correcting an image, but it completely depends on the photo and the effect you want to achieve.