How to get the desired look for your images

When I first use my Dslr camera I found the images I make dull, not saturated colors, low contrast, poor sharpness etc. Compact cameras are different than Dslr cameras because they apply heavy image processing in camera, like sharpening, add contrast, saturation of colors etc. Perhaps this is not the case for you, but if you interested how to change the images your camera made it is to check the following:

You need to check the thing in a camera menu called

picture style

Here you can adjust your style what you prefer more saturated colors or less, more contrast or less as you like, more or less level of sharpening

the three main things to adjust here are:

Sharpness: sharpening, makes the images look sharper
Contrast:perhaps the most powerful tool, gives more life to the pictures
Saturation: give life to dull colors

Here in this menu you can use Black and white or Sepia setting as well on some cameras.

In my camera there is a possibility for 3 user defined settings.
There are other pre-set settings are available like landscape, snow, portraits, etc.
These setting are for jpgs if you shoot in Raw you adjust theses values afterwards.

The settings are quite different for different lenses, the setting which seems very nice with one lens, can be bizarre with the other. The key word here is experimenting.

Post processing

In post processing you can alter these settings even more with software like Photoshop or Gimp.