1. Stop Looking Sideways: Rotate the Picture

Cameras don’t take square pictures; they take rectangular ones. To frame a scene that’s taller than it is wide, you probably turned the camera on its side before you snapped the shutter release. That’s great, but don’t send those sideways pictures to your friends. Turn them right side up first

2. Seasick? Straighten the Picture

In the rush to take a photo, we don’t always get the camera perfectly level–and that adds up to photos in which the horizon is slightly askew, as if you had shot the pictures from a sailboat. Fear not. Crooked digital photos are nearly as easy to straighten as picture frames hanging on your wall. (And they’re more likely to stay straight after you fix them, too.)

3. Crop Away the Background

In your mind’s eye, the picture may have been a shot of your nephew’s birthday cake. But now that you see it on your PC, you realize that you didn’t zoom in very far–so you’ve taken a picture of half the room as well. Use your image editor’s cropping tool to cut away the unwanted part of the picture and isolate just the meat of the scene.

4. Shine Some Light in the Darkness

Is your photo too dark? A slight underexposure can ruin an otherwise great photo, so punch up the brightness a bit to give it some life. Try your image editor’s gamma control–a tool that’s designed to brighten the darkest parts of the picture without "overexposing" the parts that are already bright. If your image editor offers gamma control, you’ll usually find the feature in menus like Colors or Image. Some programs, such as Microsoft Photo Editor, let you access the tool (Image Balance) from the toolbar.

5. Zap the Red-Eye

Using your camera’s flash can sometimes cause the dreaded red-eye effect. If your photos look like they’re filled with demonic partygoers, you can zap the red-eye out of your shots automatically in many image editors.