Quickly brightening up a photo in photoshop.

Step 6: Check out your results and decide it you like them.

I've popped a little comparison image together there to give an idea of the difference, this isn't a perfect way of doing things but it gives you a set of basic steps to making an image look a bit better if it was too dull to start with.

You'll notice I've not bothered with noise reduction here, one plugin that's good for noise reduction is neatimage, photoshop's built in noise removal tools are alright but there are better for free, I'll dig up a few, it's not a complicated process, in fact many of them work really well on their best guess settings.