Grainy photos and troubles in macro

[rstar]

Originally Posted by Myka

I use Picasa to touch up color on the photos, but I still can't get it even close to the vibrancy of reality.

Thats your problem right there. Unless you export the photos picasa compresses them right down to nothing. The camera should have come with its own software. I use Olympus master, its what came with the camera, but i also think its available for free and should work with any picture type other than raw unless the camera is an olympus. Its simple and does a good job, it will actually allow you to enter any color tempurature you want to alter the white balance. For the hard core editors there is always photoshop.