Many people have trouble knowing how or whether or not in the first place to edit their digital photos. Most photographs just don't turn out the way you imagined; they might be too dark, or too red, or too big. Depending on what you need in a digital photo-editing program, you may want to get a more simple or a slightly more advanced software. For example, if all you're planning on doing is correcting a few minor details in a picture, you want to go as simple as possible. If you're planning on adding things to pictures or taking them out, or changing the color of objects, you will want a more advanced program.

Redeye can ruin an otherwise perfectly good portrait, but there are ways to remove it. Unfortunately some of these methods can remove detail in the eyes and make them look very unusual, even lifeless.The cause of red eye is the flash reflecting from the back of the eye and into the lens. The best thing is to avoid the flash to reflect from the eyes from the very beginning. Red-eye reduction works by having the flash shine a light into the eyes of the subject just prior to the flash/shutter event. This serves to cause the irises in the subject's eyes to narrow down. The result of this is a smaller opening into the eye for a camera's eye view of the blood filled retina. Obviously, this would work only if the subject is actually looking at the flash for the pre-light.

If you've taken a photo in a wrong orientation, it's easily corrected with little loss in quality by using a rotate tool. You'll also want to do some cropping of your photo to remove cluttered surroundings that draw attention away from your subject. Many photographs benefit from being cropped to show the most important feature and to remove the unwanted area around it. In fact, cropping is the single fix that is most likely to improve your photos. Your photo editing software will offer different methods of cropping your photos once you've downloaded them onto your computer. You might be surprised when you start cropping images very tightly and using shapes, as to just how different your image looks and how much of an improvement it makes.

Don't be afraid to experiment with colors. Image editing programs put a lot of power in your hands. You can make the leaves purple, change the entire photo to black and white, add a sepia effect - almost anything you want. A good photo editing program will have automatic color balance options to adjust color defects in your pictures. You can do just about anything you want. All you have to do is play around until you have a result you like.

Most of us upload our pictures or print them the way they were captured by our digital cameras. We read and hear of a post-processing technique called "Sharpening" using "USM" (or "UnSharp Mask") and decide it is just too difficult for us. Most cameras -- especially in the "pro" category -- will capture an image without applying any sharpening to it, resulting in an image that appears "soft" or even slightly "out of focus." Others will apply a certain degree of sharpening to the images and output crisp looking images. Most beginners prefer the latter type, while most advanced photographers prefer the former. When a camera processes your images, it is in effect deciding the amount of sharpening to give your images without your input. Some cameras do a good job at it, others do too much of it. If your camera produces "soft" images (because it does not sharpen for you), then you are in fact in luck. Using an image editing software such as Photoshop Elements, you can apply sharpening yourself to selected pictures for maximum impact, either for screen display or for printing.

Depending on your needs, you may want to resize your photo. If you're emailing a picture to a friend, you'll want to resize the picture down to a much smaller size. If you're printing the photo on a greeting card, you can scale down the image to the size of a 4x6 print. Most pictures need a little work to get them just right. You can turn an average picture into a great one with a minor fix: resizing the picture. With a digital photo-editing program, you can complete this task easily and quickly.

Final compression and using the right format can be as important as taking good photos and scanning them correctly. Macs and pc's - and other types of machines - are readily mixed in today's computer environments. This means that proprietary file formats are no longer useful, because you want to be able to exchange files with other people using other types of computers. Web formats are excellent exchange formats, but unfortunately not well suited for archival purposes. This list covers the most common file formats and comments on their characteristics. BMP is the format that is the native Windows format, but it has no advantages over TIFF apart from support in Windows Paint. It is accurate but compresses poorly and has nothing close to the flexibility of TIFF. Use TIFF for archiving in stead. Useless on the web. TIFF is the best format for storing originals and transporting files. TIFF is accurate and compresses well without loss of quality. TIFF can store all types of pictures - simple and complex, B/W and color, photos and logos. TIFF is platform independent and works on both Mac's and PC's.

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