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

So obviously you will need to tweak these later in an image program.  Take a 
photo of something white in the same location to get a good reference for 
later post-processing.

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

Just tweak it as much as you want in your software - I didn't want to make 
it look too fake though.  Here's your other photo attached.  With digital 
it's so easy to make it look so much better.

> 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.

That is why it is very important that the exposure is not set too high when 
you take the photo.  If you look at the histogram of the photo I edited, it 
is obvious a lot of pixels are clipped at white.  If you'd turned down the 
exposure a bit on the camera then the colours would probably have turned out 
more saturated already. (eg RGB=100,200,100 exposed double gives 
RGB=200,255,200 which looks washed out)

> If you're lucky, you might be able to reveal the JPEG compression 
> artifacts, but that is all.

IME cameras save JPEG with extremely low compression, like the 1/100 setting 
in an image editor.

> You also can't focus a fuzzy image

Your photos didn't look fuzzy to me.

> In short, post-processing is a hopeless task.

Professionals would disagree with you.

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