D70: no PS editing out-of-the box perfect images?

Hello

I have been having my first digital camera, D70, for some time now, and no matter what settings and format i shoot i am finding that i need to use photoshop levels (auto levels, auto color etc) family of processing to live up and balance the usually dulled out images. No matter what, it seems theres always curves room for autolevels to work with .... sometimes i even needed to do a lot of custom editing to bring the image to its intended potential.

Are there ways to have D70 images virtually not needing any processing out-of-the-box (-camera) ?

i suspect this must have been an old and trivial question but the search function hasnt been much of a help (or i am just dumber than the average user the coders of the search module had in mind)