I'm extremely new at photography and my resources and budget are limited. I looked at some of the images I have (on my computer and not uploaded yet) and compared them to some of the other ones here and realized that a lot of mine seem faded or lacking in brilliant colors. Can I fix this? Is it possible, with limited resources and budget?

Thanks :)

What you probably want to to is increase the contrast (the difference between dark and light areas) and increase the color saturation. This will make the images look less "faded", but ideally you want to avoid this by making sure the conditions are as good as they can be before you take the photo in the first place. I find that lighting conditions are generally best in the mornings and afternoons, as midday sun tends to be too strong and wash out your photos (depending on the weather; on overcast days you can get good even lighting at midday). You also want to avoid taking photos when light levels are too low (your flash going off is a simple sign of this) and youveant to avoid high contrast between light and shadow as the dark areas will be too dark and the light areas will be washed out.

There might be some more info on contrast and color saturation in the "tutorials" gallery.

Hey Jennifer...Welcome to Caedes!

Some excellent and sound advise from Sam above ^. I don't have anything to add in this area.

However, you didn't say if you are currently using any photo editing programs for post-work on your images. If you are looking for suggestions in this area, I would recommend the following freeware Window programs;

- Photofiltre

- GIMP

- Or you could check out this Caedes thread, Suggested Software

Hope you find this info useful :)