Ok. I took a couple of photos recently and had to clean up some of the noise on them in Photoshop.

The links are here and here.

I use a Canon Power Shot. I can't tell if it's just the focus I'm having trouble with or my settings in general. What should they be for outdoors?

;) .. telling us what the settings were 'might' help

you must talk before we can run

looking at them now as my "trickle down web-a-nomics" bandwidth delivers them to my door

you say .. "manipulated" in your descripts .. but ask us to address clarity (sharpness?) ..

if the images linked to contained no postwork .. or .. the postwork didn't affect the clarity\sharpness ... I would say your camera's software is a little heavy handed in its algorithms (jpegging, noise-reduction, etc)

but .. Phil can address those issues better than I .. he actually reads .. I just know how to

What I did was adjust the color after running the noise-removal filter.

Emily, looks like the color temp's a bit cool. Try warming it up a bit.
Also, if you can, reduce the cyan level in your whites, and darken/reduce your overall blue level (or reduce blue gamma). The sharper color contrast will lend to the overall perceived sharpness of the image.

Here ya go Emily ... dovetailing on some of the suggestions above ... a cornucopia of tutorials for PSP.

In particular, "Tonal and Color Corrections" is addressed by a tutorial near the bottom two thirds of the webpage ... here.

I think the noise reduction you used was a little 'heavy'. I'm not sure how PSP works, so I won't get into that. Because I have to go to bed 3 minutes ago, I'm going to keep things really short:

-If you were using a low ISO, chances are you wouldn't even need to use noise reduction. If you do do noise reduction, apply the noise reduction filter and THEN resize the image and THEN sharpen.
-Try sharpening.
-I wouldn't worry too much about the color.
-It might be focus. Was the image blurry before you used noise reduction?
-It doesn't look like motion blur

Settings for outdoor daytime photos: Low ISO, appropriate shutter speed (over 1/200th).

Do not apply in camera noise reduction, sharpening, etc. PSP can probably do everything better.

Sorry I'm in a hurry to get to bed, g'night.

Heh. The color was one of the things I adjusted in Paint Shop to make it look more artistic.

So I should use a lower ISO? I'll try that.