[allan gould]

Does anyone know of a good tutorial or dummy's guide to manipulating photos taken with a dslr. I have several shots (say 10 x 4min shots) of an object - but do I add, combine or what to make a great photo as generally seen on some web pages. In other words I understand about averaging all the shots to remove noise but if the object is still faint after averaging then this doesn't help bring out detail etc.
Just need some help
Regards, Allan