It's always a good idea to read through the manual; I went for months taking crappy closeups before I realised the camera had a pretty good-quality focus if only I'd set it properly. As for software, if you don't have any decent photo-editing tool and you're not willing to either pay or do something illegal (which would probably be just as well), try out the gimp. (http://www.gimp.org/downloads/) It's free and works well, may take a little getting used to, but so does anything.
Something I've noticed is that when I do take black and white photos, I regret it later because I might like to see the colour version and edit it. If you take a colour photo then you can make it black and white with software OR you can make some bits black and white and some colour, or just fade the colour, etc - whereas if you take a black and white picture, that's pretty much it.
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