The advances and conveniences in digital photography make it possible for anyone to take a perfect picture, but how exactly is this possible is we all are not the world's greatest photographer? By touching up your raw images through digital editing you can take what was once an average picture and make it a great photograph. Maybe you needed to lighten your image, crop or rotate a bit and even clean up some dirty spots; this is all quick and simple to do once you know how. Most pictures need some type of adjusting to produce the final image. Take a look at this short guide to help you with the most common touch ups for your photos.

Step 1: Start Up Your Image Editor The first step, of course, is to fire up your favorite image editing program. For beginners, it's best to get a program like Ulead PhotoImpact. It's a great tool that allows you to achieve professional photo effects using simple, easy-to-follow steps.

Step 2: Remove Red-Eye If you're taking photos of people, chances are you may have taken a photo with red-eye problems. This is easily removed with image editing software. In Paint Shop Pro, select the Red-Eye Removal tool in the menu and voila, the program does all the work for you. In Ulead PhotoImpact, there's an equivalent tool called Remove Red Eye in the Tool Panel.

Step 3: Rotate and Crop If you want to change the angle of your photograph, you can do this with little loss in quality by using the rotate tool. You may also need to crop your photo to remove cluttered or unnecessary background area that might take focus away from the subject of the photo. Doing this will create a much more professional look.

Step 4: Play with Color Experiment with the different color tools for a different look. Through the versatility of digital editing programs you can make the sky green, the whole photo black and white, or give it an antiqued look with a sepia tone. A good photo editing program will have an automatic color balance option to adjust color flaws in your pictures.

Step 5: Blurring Effects Sometimes I like to add a blurring effect to my photos. What you can do here is to select areas of the photo which are unimportant and blur them out. This will bring more attention to the main subject of your photo. For example, if I had a picture of a flower and I wanted to play down the details in the leaves in background, I might add a blurring effect to the background.

Step 6: Sharpen Up The next step in touching up a photo would be to sharpen as needed. While you cannot truly sharpen an out of focus image you can improve on it by selectively sharpening focal points. Sharpen a person's eyes for example and leave the rest of the image unsharpened.

Step 7: Resize You may need to resize your photo depending on your needs. Resize down to a smaller size to e-mail your pictures to family. Resize to a 4x6 print to turn your image into a greeting card.

Step 8: Save Your Work We're almost finished. Now all you have to do is save your work in the suitable image format. If you want to save all of the details for future editing, save in the TIFF format. If you want to send the picture by e-mail or upload to a web site, choose the JPEG format for saving the image.

Conclusion That's it! Now you know the basics for touching up and getting your raw digital photos ready for output. While you don't have to use every step listed above, it can give you a starting point to see which ones a certain picture might need. Have fun with your photos, experiment to see what enhancements you like best and practice, practice, practice!