You have a good high-end camera capable of professional work and you've been wanting to improve your editing for some time now. I think those two factors mean it's time for you to go to the camera and set it to save CR2 raw files. Nothing else you can do trying to repair camera JPEGs will even come close to improving your end results.
It will be a big change but folks here can help and it will be worth it. Considering your camera and what you just said tells me you're ready.
While you start to learn there's no need to spend money. Save that for later. Your camera came with software on a CD, but all you have to do is go to Canon's website and you can download the most recent version free of charge. Canon cameras are supplied by Canon with a copy of DPP (Digital Photo Professional). You can start there. Eventually you may want to add other raw processing software when you have a better understanding. Lightroom is a popular choice but there are lots of other options at varying price points and with varying capabilities. Start to learn with the software that came with your camera and then once you have a better idea what's possible you can extend your software tools.
Let me show you two photos that explain why you should consider this change.
Above you see the JPEG that came from my camera, in this case a Canon 5d. The photo belongs in a trashcan as the highlights in the sky are blown out. Blown out highlights can't be repaired because the data is missing. You can't fix something that isn't there. I knew that would happen but I set the camera exposure to record the much darker area in the foreground which is after all the subject of the photo. As far as the camera JPEG processor was concerned this photo was a classic rock and hard place choice. I could have reduced exposure so the sky would not blow out but then I wouldn't have enough exposure on the darker subject in the foreground. Shooting this scene and saving a camera JPEG forces me to chose between bad option one or bad option two. There's no camera JPEG option that isn't bad.
But I saved a raw CR2 file in which the highlights in the sky are not blown. Make sure that sinks in. What happened to damage the JPEG above and blow out the highlights in the sky was done by the camera software that created that JPEG. That damage is not present in the raw file. And so I was able to process the raw file by hand and get the photo that I wanted. Below is the photo that I took. It's from the exact same raw file as the photo above. Above processed by the camera and below processed by me. My version has color and detail in the sky.
What you need to understand about this photo: 1. It could not have been produced by the camera JPEG software and 2. Any JPEG the camera would create could not be repaired to produce this photo. The photo I took was only possible because I saved the raw CR2 file and processed it myself.
You'll encounter comments that raw processing is too involved and takes too much time and you'll wind up chained to your computer and never have time to take photos again. There's truth to all of that but you've already made the first move. You're asking about editing your photos and improving the results. The way to make JPEG shooting take less time is to accept the JPEGs the way the camera delivers them and do the best you can to coax decent results from the camera -- stay away from the computer. As soon as you say "edit" you're headed to the computer and I promise you that it takes longer and requires considerably more skill to repair a camera JPEG than it does to just process a raw file from the start. And your repair work on the JPEG will be inferior to the photo processed from the raw file. So I recommend you take the easy route and throw that switch in your camera -- it's in the menu under Quality --> RAW. Then download a copy of DPP and come back here when you have questions.
Joe
