Now we get there. Should have said that earlier, as I never looked into any tweaking of photo or video taking. I now copied the libgstdsp.so to /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdsp.so like described in the 720p thread and am now running into the problem, that the camera application simply closes after taking the picture due to an internal error and the photos are saved with 0 KB. So something is wrong there, I don't know what. Note, I did not install the whole 720p thing, never dealt with that, so I am just having that one lib on my system. Anything else I am missing or anyway else I can help? Otherwise I'll simply delete that lib again and reboot and will go without dsp, as the photos already look pretty nice now with all the other tweaks.
apt-get purge gstreamer0.10-dsp apt-get install gstreamer0.10-dsp
what about video encoding ? using another profile?