PhotoSHOP?

[Hill_Black]

It sounds like the Photoshop techniques that would work best for you would be using blending modes and creating vignettes. For example, using certain blending modes on two layers containing the same image (in other words, there's one layer with the original image and another layer with a copy of the same image right above it) will make the image brighter or darker, make the colors more vivid, etc. Vignettes make it possible to smoothly blend the edges of an image into a background. Fortunately, there are some great tutorials on both of those:

Blending modes tutorial (and don't worry too much about the math aspect; just experiment for yourself and find out which blending modes work for your images):
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Vignettes tutorial:
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Hope this helps.