There are a lot of tools out there for adjusting your photos, and here is a sample photo that was salvaged using two of them.

Nikon Capture
It's a shame this did not come with the D70, but it is wortht the $100 it costs to buy it after the camera sale.  One of the big selling strengths of Nikon capture is its ability to manipulate NEF files from Nikon's digital SLRs.

 I shot my "flubbed" photos using JPGs instead of NEFs but Capture did a great job of recovering the unusable photo anyway.  The feature I bought Capture for is the Digital DEE exposure analyzer.  Basically this filter pulls lost detail out of the shadows and highlights of the photo by varying the exposure across the image to get a good level of detail all over, so you can "fix" the dark areas withought making the rest of the photo way too bright.  If you think you might want this download the a free 30 day trial version at http://nikonusa.com and try it -- but you must have a nikon camera serial number to get the download.

Neat Image
I started using Neat Image as a free mostly functional download (http://neatimage.com).  I am surprised at how good it is at smoothing noise out of images without bluring the detail of the photo.  I've tried the noise reduction in Nikon Capture and the blur and median tools in Photoshop and I can't seem to get either of them to work nearly as well as Neat Image.  Definitely worth the $29 price. of the home user version.

The first row photos: Crops of the images at 100% pixel level. 

1.  You can see in the first image that although I had added some positive exposure compensation for the bright window in the background I obviously  blew this shot.  Not a usable photo.  I was very disappointed when I pulled this one up on the PC.

2.  In the second image I have used Nikon Capture's Digital DEE to recover the darkened detail.  Big difference.  But now the brightened pixels show a lot of noise, still not really a usable image.

3.  After using Neat Image to smooth out the noise the third picture retains almost all of the second images detail but sports a lot less noise.  Finally, an image that would make a decent print (not great, but usable).

DSC_1661crop.jpg	DSC_1661eCrop.jpg	DSC_166filteredeCrop.jpg
_DSC_1661.jpg	_DSC_1661e.jpg	_DSC_1661filterede.jpg

The second row photos:  Resized full frames of the picture.

1.  Image unedited but resized to 768 pixels wide.

2.  Image after Nikon Capture's Digital DEE and resized to 768 pixels wide.

3.  Image after DEE and Neat Image's noise smothing and resized to 768 pixels wide.