1. Learn to shoot full manual mode. It's tough at first but you'll get such a greater understanding of your camera and how it works and take such better pictures
2. Shoot in RAW
3. Use a program like Lightroom to change the various values and help make your images look how they truely should. Jpeg out of camera are terrible compare to what they could be
I been trying different random settings, so far Shutter Priority with an ISO of 2200 or less seems to be good, but I also notice that I don't really need 1/8000 shutter, 1/550 is good enough, especially with a little bit of extra exposure.
I have been shooting in dual-jpg which takes a RAW and a JPG at the same time