One problem people face when starting out with digital photography is how to touch up raw digital images. Perhaps an image is slightly dark, perhaps it has to be rotated or cropped. Maybe some dirty spots have to be cleaned out and erased. Digital photos usually require some form of manipulation before final output, unless, of course one takes a perfect picture. The first step is to find an image editor. For beginners, a program that has easy, simple tools will do just fine. More advanced people can move on to more complicated programs.

New and expert photographers alike have experienced it. You take an otherwise perfect picture of friends or family but there's one major flaw: glowing red eyes. Here are some reliable tips for avoiding red-eye in the first place: whenever possible, try not to use a flash. If you have to use a flash, ask your subject to look toward the camera, but not directly at the lens. Also, use additional light sources in the room. You can also take pictures during the day, because at night the pupils will dilate meaning red-eye will be a certainty. Lastly, you can stand farther away from your subject.

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.

If you have a rather plain photograph, or a black and white picture, there are ways to manipulate the colors to make the picture more interesting. Your editing program will probably have a way to enhance the color of a picture, or you can completely change the color of an object. If you learn to use the tools well, you could be able to convert a black and white picture to color. You can also create aged effects, or make a picture grayscaled. Experiment with your program and find out what you can do to improve the coloring of your pictures.

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.

What's the "right" size for a picture? Well, that depends on the photo. Most monitors display at 72 dpi (dots per inch). So, if you want the picture to be 5 inches wide (probably about the biggest you would want for an e-mail message), the picture would be 360 pixels wide (5 inches x 72 dpi = 360 pixels). Pixel is short for "Picture Element" and is the smallest unit of visual information used to build an image. If you have ever zoomed in on an image, Pixels are those little squares that you see. The more pixels in an image, the better the resolution.

Remember to save your work in the appropriate image format. Use the large TIFF image format if you want to retain all details for subsequent image editing. On the other hand, you can use the JPEG image format if you want to just send the picture via email or upload them to your website. With the explosion of scanners, digital cameras and the World Wide Web, the JPEG image format has quickly become the most widely used digital image format.

Many people believe a JPEG image will lose quality every time it is opened or saved. This is simply not true. Saving a JPEG repeatedly during the same editing session (without ever closing the image) will not accumulate a loss in quality. Copying and renaming a JPEG will not introduce any loss, but some image editors do recompress JPEGs when the Save As command is used. To avoid more loss you should duplicate and rename JPEGs in a file manager rather than using "Save As JPEG" in an editing program. However, if a JPEG image is opened, edited, and saved again it results in additional image degradation.

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