The digital photography revolution is allowing the average person to participate in every part of the photo process from taking the photo all the way to printing it out. For some, the process may seem kind of complicated but it's actually very simple and easy to do. So here is a step by step guide on how to take and edit your digital photos.

The first step is to have a digital camera that will produce clear and sharp photos. For most consumers that means a camera that has between 4 - 6 megapixels of resolution. With this kind of resolution, you can print out high quality photos right on up to about 8 X 10 in size, which is more than enough for the needs of most people.

Once you have taken your photos you can either print them out straight from the camera as snapshots if you have a photo printer with the PictBridge feature that lets you connect directly to the printer from your camera, or you can take the media card out and insert that into the printer for printing instead. A lot of times you can actually make simple edits in your camera before printing that allow you to rotate the images if needed or maybe some simple cropping as well.

But if you want the highest quality prints you can upload the photos from your camera into a digital photo editing software program on your computer where you can crop the photos any way that you wish to eliminate unwanted sections of the photo, and adjust the color, sharpness and contrast along with lots of other special effects too. Then you can save the photo files on your computer, and wipe the media card in your camera clean for reuse the next time you want to take some photos.

Afterward, you can then print the saved photo files out on your photo printer. Most photo printers are capable of turning out extremely high quality images that have great contrast and color saturation, oftentimes rivaling those that come from a processing lab.

After printing, you can then take the saved image files on your computer and even send them to family and friends easily and quickly by email. All they have to do is just load them up and print them out on their printer if they wish, or the digital images can also be used for web pages or computer screensavers.

So as you can see the process of taking a digital photo and getting from the camera to a print is not all that involved, and once you have done it a few times it will become second nature to you. Of course, you can always choose the level of sophistication that you wish to use in producing each print too. If you wish to keep things simple you can still get great results while you do. And if you want to turn out more professional results, that is also possible.