iam not sure - but you want to look into the cell and toon shading in maya/mental ray. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF6pPQnzSCE"]Adding textures to toon shaders in Maya - YouTube[/ame] Maybe that helps. There also some camera filter on your image.. But yes - as deadly said - we need some more infomations.
Yeah, the toon-shaded version look a lot better, can you apply the toon shader to the UV'd version? If you're required to use normal maps, but didn't learn to sculpt and bake yet, then you can try adding detail to your normal map with photoshop plugins like the nvidia normal map plugin and so on.