The complaint isn’t baseless. Most DSLRs, by default, do less in-camera processing than compacts; the assumption being that you’d rather start with as exact a replica of reality as possible and edit it later.

Still, there’s little worse than a perfectly-composed, perfectly-exposed image that nonetheless doesn’t look as exciting as you thought it would. The answer is to get to grips with the Levels and Curves tools. The good news is that virtually every photo editor includes these, from Photoshop and Lightroom, to Photoshop Elements, and even free applications such as the GIMP.

The image below is a good example of a shot that needs work. Through the viewfinder, the car looked bold and striking, and juxtaposed nicely against the sky. On screen, though, the image is lifeless and hazy.

The simplest tool in your arsenal is the Levels control. In the GIMP it’s under Tools | Colour Tools | Levels, while Photoshop Elements users will find it under Enhance | Adjust Lighting | Levels…, or by pressing CTRL+L. What you’re presented with is a histogram of the current image. At the left-hand side is 0 – i.e. black – and at the right is 255 – i.e. white. The graph in the middle is your image’s tonal range. So, if you have a tall peak on the right-hand side of the histogram, your image is very bright, and vice versa if your graph is mountainous towards the left.

The trouble is that plenty of images don’t utilise the full tonal range available, so nowhere on the image – or not very much – is either pure white or pure black, and your image lacks contrast.

The histogram in Photoshop Elements for our image looks like this:

The problem isn’t immediately clear: the image makes reasonable use of most of the tonal range, but a lot of it is spread thinly along the left-hand side, which is why our shot lacks punch and looks washy.

A useful rule of thumb with the Levels tool is to drag the black and white point sliders towards the middle, until they touch the edges of the histogram. This means the lightest point in your image will be pure white, and the darkest point black. This will increase the contrast in your image. Here’s our original image on the left, contrasted against our final image on the right. The difference is subtle (which is the point, after all), but the right-hand image is more interesting to look at, and because we’ve only dragged the image sliders to the edge of the histogram, our image still has all the detail it had when we pressed the shutter release.

The image is much better, but to finish it off we’ll employ the Curves tool. In the GIMP this can be found under Colours | Curves, and Enhance | Adjust Color | Adjust Color Curves in Photoshop Elements.

The resultant dialog boxes look like this in the GIMP and Photoshop Elements respectively.

Understanding the curves dialog box is simple. The horizontal axis represents the tones currently in your image. Again, dark tones are on the left, light tones on the right. The vertical axis is your output tones. Click on the diagonal line and you take a tone on the horizontal axis and convert it into a tone on the vertical axis. Click OK and your changes are applied to the image. For instance, click on the diagonal line near the top and drag it down, and you’ll make light tones darker.

The classic rule of thumb is to create an S-shape with your tone curve. This increases the contrast in your image dramatically.

And here’s what happens if we apply the above S-curve to our image of a car.

The result is far more striking. We’ve deepened the redness of the car without deepening all the tones in the image and creating a murky, under-exposed effect. The only caveat is to be careful. Heavily-saturated, punchy images work well on screen (you need only look at Flickr to see their popularity), but once printed they can be a little overwhelming, which isn’t what you’re after if you’re trying to produce something to mount on the wall.

Accelerators are the headline act. Think of them as contextual searching: the ability to do a search related to any piece of text on a page. But IE8 doesn’t simply perform the equivalent of copy-and-pasting your highlighted text into Google: you can do plenty more.

Using Accelerators is simplicity itself: highlight any piece of text and a small blue icon shimmers into view nearby.

Click it and you’re presented with a list of Accelerators. So highlight a postcode, for instance, hover over Map with Live Search, and a second or so later you’ll be presented with a map of the local area in situ.

Alternatively, you can click on Map with Live Search to open your map in a new tab. This neat feature doesn’t work with all Accelerators, unfortunately. A few, such as Define with Google, force you to open a new tab, which can be frustrating when you simply wanted a brief answer.

It comes as no surprise that the default Accelerators are heavy with Windows Live and Live Search options, but there’s already a fair range of options from other providers. By default, Email This directs you to Windows Live Mail, but can be supplanted by Gmail or AOL, or you could add both. You can add the option to share either a chunk of text or an entire page on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter or Windows Live Messenger. The full list of Accelerators can be found on Microsoft’s official site. All your installed search engines also appear in the Accelerator menu.

It’s possible to optimise your list of Accelerators to make getting information even faster. To do this, go to Tools > Manage Add-ons, then click Accelerators. By default, when you click the Accelerator icon on a web page, you’re given every Accelerator that has Default status in the Manage Add-ons window. So if you find yourself frequently digging into the nested menu for All Accelerators, you can make it a Default Accelerator, and it will appear on the main menu. You can only have one Default Accelerator in each category, but it’s possible to create a different category. So if you’d like Gmail and Windows Live Mail to appear on the first Accelerator menu, you could move Gmail to a new category and set it as the default in that one.

Finally, the default blank page in IE8 (about:Tabs) has a section called Use an Accelerator. This shows all of your Accelerators with Default status, and when you click one it takes you to the home page of that Accelerator. So click Share on Facebook and you’ll be taken to your Facebook profile. Alternatively you can click Show copied text, and any text on the clipboard will appear, ready to be Accelerated.

A fresh lick of paint has been applied to the search bar too. As with IE7, you can add almost any search provider you like, but certain search engines – notably Wikipedia, Amazon and eBay – produce as-you-go previews of your search terms, called visual search suggestions. So search Wikipedia for Boeing, for instance, and you’ll see a series of search results, complete with thumbnail images.

It’s a useful included feature for eBay as well, letting you see the first few hits of any search term: a godsend for those whose search behaviour rarely involves looking beyond the first few results. The only drawback is that visual search suggestions require the complicity of IE8 and the search engine in question. So add Google to your instant search box, for instance, and you don’t get anything more interesting than a list of your most recent searches.