Learning how to photoshop

I'm slowly trying to teach myself the editing techniques of Adobe Photoshop. It's hard because the language used in photoshop is hard to understand if you haven't been taught the definitions. I'm still learning step by step, slowly but surely. For the photos above, I tried to make the actual object (my car) stand out more than the rest of the picture. I wanted the background to look unreal. So basically, what I did was increase the contrast and sharpness of the object. Then I outlined and copied only the car itself. After I created a layer from my copy, I changed the contrast and saturation of the original image. After that's done, I pasted my copy of the car (2nd layer) over the original image that I just edited. This ends up being a perfect fit because the copy was taken from the original image. This is just a brief explanation of the process. There's a little more to it of course.

As you can see above, the top two photos are the original. They were taken with my girlfriend's point and shoot camera (Canon SD400). The picture quality of the SD400 isn't as good as the Rebel XTi but that's left for another discussion.

You can see the results of the photoshop in the bottom two pictures. My goal was to make the object stand out and make the background look unreal. I think I somewhat accomplished my goal.

There's a technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR) that can make your images look unreal. It's basically merging the same images taken at different exposures to bring out the color of your image. I think I will mess around with that technique next.