another newbie question this one about editing

[Bolerus]

Ok

I have seen lots of people say "yeah thats good but Photshop it" etc


What exatly do people tend to do in photoshop or the like.

All i have at the moment, is MGI photosuite and the Dimax viewer thing that came with the minolta cam.


Are these enough, or shoudl I buy something better, but more inportantly if i do shell out for Photoshop, what would I be looking to do with it

for example, here is one of my little girl, all i have done is croped it down a little and resized it

so what should i be doing in manipulation software, other than lightenign it a bit

also, I havent even started playing with the setting on the camera yet, other that the ISO which I think I had set on 400.

I am a total newbie to all this photography milarky, but i do want to learn

so if you think its pants, thats fine, just say why you think its bad, and what i coudl have done to improve

thanks in advance

 

[rpstewart]

so what should i be doing in manipulation software, other than lightenign it a bit

Caveat: This laptop panel is pants so I could be talking pap.

I wouldn't be lightening it to be honest, it looks a touch over exposed if anything from here. There's not a huge amount of contrast around her face as a result so I'd be looking at boosting that to begin with.

There's a lot of JPG artifacting in the background but that's possibly more from the crop & resize than the original, not much that can be done to sort that without applying so much smoothing that the image detail is lost.

If the image has been taken at ISO400 there's likely to be a fair bit of image noise (coloured speckling across the image) so some noise reduction may be in order. This will cause some smoothing and consequential loss of detail but it tends to be more targeted than the normal smoothing tools. Though smoothing may not be that bad for portraits as it can give almost a soft focus effect.

 

[starscream]

I'm only a newbie to this, but what I have done is mess with the levels to make the background more black, reduced the noise a little and upped the saturation and contrast a touch

Edit : on seeing it uploaded, its too dark, will try again.....

 

[Bolerus]

'i have just gone into dimage viewer and it says the aperature was 5.6 on this pic.

am i correct in thinkg that i shoudl be getting it a lot lower than that? I believe the lens i used goes down to 2.8 or am i showing my ignorance again lol.

I am sorry for all these terrible questions, but i really dont have a clue, i even get confused by the lingo, but i figure if i dont ask, then i will never learn.