Can someone tell me if I'm doing this right?

[r3dline]

I've only had my digital rebel for about a month now, and I've just been snapping away (over 1200 shots so far) in fine jpeg mode. But none of my pictures have had that "wow" factor so far. So I figured...maybe there's something to this whole "post processing" thing. So yesterday, I finally hooked up an external monitor and mouse to my iBook and opened up some pictures in Photoshop and began messing around with the Levels, Saturation, Contrast, and Colors on some of the pictures. Well I was able to make a drastic change in some of the photos, but I'm just wanting someone to tell me if I'm actually improving the pictures or making them look worse. All I know is it looks...brighter...and at first it seems more appealing to my eyes. But maybe I'm just thinking the "difference" is better rather than the actually quality is improving. So here's a couple pictures of my girlfriend that I took at a lake. The first is straight out of my drebel with no adjustments, and the second is after some photoshop adjustments. Which one looks better to you?

Oh yeah, and please look over the lower quality smaller versions of these pictures. After I put them on my girlfriend's old desktop (the only one in the apartment that has internet access right now, and that's a long story) I just resized them using Microsoft Paint. The originals are a lot sharper than these (and of course bigger).