I manipulate, doodle, and experiment, lol.  Sometimes a lot.  Sometimes a little but almost always I do something.

I have a point and shoot camera and my skills are less than proficent with it so as has been stated by others - I do the best I can with the camera, then try to creatively improve the images with editing programs. My images come out of the camera as jpgs then I convert to tiff and work on them. I doubt the saved tiff image is a better image than the original jpg but by using tiff, i avoid pixilations that occur with multiple opening/editing/saving activities. I do notice that there are major file size differences between the different formats when saving the same image using them but I am not sure the images look different when viewed on the pc. Maybe printed versions would show whether or not the larger file size version (tiff) is better than the smaller file size version (jpg).

It may be unsupported but I often get the feeling that my images are more photo imagery than photography. but I have come to an acceptance that it doesn't really matter. I would like to think that a good image will be appreciated regardless of the particulars of how it was achieved.

My advice is that you experiment and see what happens. I highly recommend Paint Shop Pro 9 as  a user friendly, highly affordable,  high quality editing program. So there is my 2 cents worth.

Lee