Newbie Here

Hello to all! A newbie in New Jersey here. Have had my XTi for exactly one week today. I am amazed at what the camera can do, and I really haven't even scratched the surface yet!

I'm a little embarassed to say this, but it took me a few visits to the forum to figure out that most of you did not live in Image Editing, Oklahoma!

You guys are a great source of information, and have already helped me in a few ways.

Here is a picture I took last evening. I did originally shoot this in the RAW setting. Let me know what you think. Be gentle, I am a NEWBIE!!

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Welcome to POTN, bnorm. I hope you brought some money - this can be an expensive hobby! (And the folk on POTN will be very happy to help you spend...)

That photo doesn't look terribly sharp to me. There's no EXIF data so I can't check the shutter speed, but I wonder if you took it in poor light with a slow-ish shutter and got a bit of camera shake?

Also, it looks quite orangey to me, which is a classic symptom of the white balance being wrong. Of course I don't know what colour it's supposed to be. Do you think the colour is accurate? If not, it's dead easy to fix if you shot RAW.

Learning RAW right off is a must. I didn't because my sons said I didn't need to. Boy, were they wrong.

But your shot is fine. What you need to do is to get familiar with the way you shoot and find the forum here that you can learn the most from. I do events shooting and the wedding folks have been amazing at teaching me what I need to do. I've learned more here than from any book or course. And the POTN family is so great. I've meet many, many of these photographers and everyone has been talented and fun and wonderful. So, participate and don't be afraid to get criticism and help.

Picture looks grainy and unsharp because it was taken with ISO 1600, f/16, 1.3”.
Open up aperture a bit more, there is really no need for f/16.
That will give you faster shutter speed, 1.3 seconds is far too slow for hand holding, even at 55mm.
Choose lowest ISO that will give you enough shutter speed (at a given aperture) to prevent both subject motion blur (not the case in this shot) and camera motion blur.

Welcome to POTN!