What could be done with this ?

[squishy]

i suppose how natural your end result looks only matters if thats what you are trying to get. if you are trying to make photographic art, then the natural look doesn't matter much

[Geoff F]

I would recommend this site Digital Photography Tutorials for some good tutorials on photo editing. It does go from beginner to advanced a bit quickly but there is a lot of useful information there.

A lot of the basic editing software just has auto adjustment and click which of these images looks best, etc. For basic editing, I prefer to give a little tweak with Curves and a bit of Unsharp Mask, but don't overdo either of them. The 'clever stuff' isn't too difficult to learn once you have mastered the basics.

I like the Serif Photo Plus programmes but the free Gimp has a lot of followers and Adobe Photoshop is probably the most used programme worldwide. Although, if I could afford around £1000 for the full Photoshop software, I would buy better lenses instead.

[BarbaraEmma]

Thanks for the interesting link Geoff F,I'm going to have to study that a bit later,I can see it will be useful for me.
I have used Photoshop in the past,my brother has loads of it,I've tried it and got on Ok.
The programme I'm using now is adequate for me I think , amongst other things,I can crop,resize very quickly,adjust the image quality,unsharp mask,adjust lightness,hue and saturation,alter red eye and blur,change the canvas size ,add frames and create a calendar, and I've just discovered clone.
This image was cloned just a bit.

What does anyone think of it now?Is it OK for a first attempt,I know it's not pin point sharp but that's my fault again.One day I'll be really pleased with one of my photos. Barbara

[squishy]

i've had a little play with that one as well

[BarbaraEmma]

Squishy I think you are so clever,your version is so much better.Now I'll show you the original,which I forgot to do yesterday.Barbara

[squishy]

that was well cloned!

i'm still learning a lot about editing, but all i did to your edit was a quick colour tweek, USM and blur out the noise.

i've found that learning how to do the blurring makes a big difference.

my favourite technique is to USM to taste (i usually set it at about radius 0.5, amount 0.5 and threshold 0, then repeat it 2 or 3 times), then i create a duplicate layer, Gaussian blur that so the noise is gone, then add an alpha channel (so when i delete, the sharp layers shows through), then use the eraser tool to erase the blurred layer on anything that should be sharp.

i'm still learning though, so i often over/under sharpen, then have to go back and try again. i think i may have oversharpened your forrester abit, but it looks OK at that size