scott wrote:
>> There's no way my camera would ever capture the lush colours and sharp 
>> edges of the images you show.
> 
> Play with the settings!  Both on the camera and in your PC software.  No 
> professional would ever dream of using the "Auto" mode and using 
> whatever image the camera happened to produce.

The camera itself doesn't have much you can adjust. Off the top of my head:

- "Colour balance" has three options:
   - "Normal".
   - "Indoor", which makes the picture slightly more blue.
   - "Outdoor", which makes the picture slightly more yellow.

- "Exposure", which has options something like "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2". 
Setting it to zero gives you normal images, turning it down makes the 
picture blacker, turning it up makes the picture whiter.

> Attached is after 5 seconds in Paint Shop Pro.

It has slightly more colour now, but it's nothing like the lush greens 
and deep browns you'd see in a glossy magazine.

> If your camera is not so good at deciding the exposure and colour for 
> itself then you must step in and either force the camera (eg by reducing 
> the exposure or setting it manually) and/or post process it on your PC.

Once the picture is taken, any detail which isn't captured in the image 
is gone forever, and can never be brought back. You can turn the 
brightness up or down, but you can't turn pure black (or pure white) 
into detail. If you're lucky, you might be able to reveal the JPEG 
compression artifacts, but that is all. You also can't focus a fuzzy 
image, or remove graininess.

In short, post-processing is a hopeless task. You have to make the 
camera take a half-decent image in the first place.

A new camera is just one of the things on my [huge] list of things to 
buy one day. (Quite aside from picture issues, my camera eats batteries 
for no apparent reason...)

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