Re: Making the most froma point and shoot
The first thing you can do is get off the auto settings and use the manual, you will always get the best from any camera with the manual settings and not auto.
It takes time and plenty of practice to get it right but you will in the end, as said above the higher the Iso the more nose you get, generally I use a 100ISO although your camera may not go that low so just use as low as you can, then get the right shutter speed ( higher is faster and will take in less light where as lower is slower and will take in more light )
Also lenses such as a ND ( neutral density ) or UV and Polarizing will also help as will a bit of post processing in something like Lightroom or Photoshop just to tweak the brightness and contrast, 99% of pictures will benefit from a tweak in those two and they are the most basic forms of processing.
There are plenty of other things you can do in Photoshop to de-noise an image from high iso etc but to begin with a bit of a brightness and contrast tweak will work wonders until you want to move further in to processing ( if you do )
Many see it as cheating but almost every pro tog I know uses Photoshop on their images even if only for slight tweaks generally in contast.
Practise and more practise is the only way you will learn, also reading and watching tuts on Youtube will help you understand more about it, especially tuts with your camera that will show you what you can achieve with it and how.
A tripod and remote shutter release will also help a lot for stability which in turns give far superior clarity, post up a couple of pics so we can see what improvements can be made