There are a couple of things I learned about digital picture enhancing today.  This may be elementary to some people who already know these things, but with me, it's trial and error.  I took pictures of two different bowls of strawberries.  I didn't like one bowl, so I cut the bowl I liked out of one picture using the lasso and pasted on the picture of the backgroud I did like.  Then, I took my eraser and erased all the outside edges of the bowl, which brought out more of the original background through.  It turned out great!  Then, I used the enhance key and went into 'hue and saturation' and added a considerable amount of additional color into the picture.  I will now use this for the reference photo to start my painting.  Perhaps this simple trick will help you out also.