AtomSoft said:
Hey futz hoping you can see this ok. Som sample pics .. from that lighting stuff..
Aziz! Light!
(quote from The Fifth Element)
Get closer. Fill the frame with your subject. Don't clip off the corners though. And add more light.
You have one lamp in there. Put 3 or 4, or some halogens.
That's a vast improvement over the "white" pic though.
EDIT: Just for fun I took the bottom pic and did a little work on it. Put em both on screen and compare side by side.
Now, there's only so much you can do with an image that has been already pinched down to fit the web. Once the information is lost you can't put it back. But you can fake it, like I did there. If that work had been done before the image was resized and compressed hard, it would look better.
Just in case you're thinking of cutting down the image size your camera takes so you can get more pics out of it, or have less work to go straight to web, DON'T DO IT. Crank it to maximum and leave it there. Buy a bigger memory card if necessary. If you're shooting little dinky pics and you happen to get the pic of the century, you'll be kickin yourself when you remember that you shot it at dinky size and it's useless for any editing or reuse. Get all the image detail you can on every image. You can always remove information to go smaller but you can never add more to go bigger.