This girls in the photo are the focal point, and their color is washed out and flat.

I don't know that I agree. The shot is actually a very well composed line-out - the cobbles recede to infinity and the tower and tree line recede to the same point, which happens to be the sun. I might be tempted to rule-of-thirds it a little better but cropping is going to happen at the editorial stage anyway. When you consider that the shot largely exists to sell the beauty of the cobblestones it works really well; if you were to use this shot in editorial the bottom half of the image is available for copy.

If the goal wasn't the cobblestones I'd fuckin' silhouette every human and tree in it. They're too muddy and disorganized to feature. Rather than making them pop I'd try to will them into oblivion. elizabeth - this would be a great use for an ND filter because if you had like an 80% or 90% gray on there, and shot into the sun, you could get a sky in one shot, get a long exposure on the tiles in another, and in that long exposure you'd have motion blur on the humans such that they suggested movement without being more than stand-ins for traffic.

If she did want to tweak the saturation on the girls you'd do it with the brush tool.

That rock wasn't nearly that red in the captured file, nor was the grass that green. But it sure as fuck was to my eye, so it sure as fuck got tweaked.