One of the great benefits of digital photography is that you can edit the shots you have taken and vastly improve the images before you print them out. This puts the ultimate responsibility for the final photo output in the hands of the photographer instead of a processing lab, and lots of people like it that way. So here are a few ideas on how to use your photo editing software.

Actually many digital cameras will let you make some basic image adjustment within the camera itself, including rotation, removing red eye from flash shots, and some basic cropping. But beyond that you will need a digital photo editing software program to take editing to the next level.

You may have gotten a photo editing program bundled with your digital camera when you bought it, so be sure to check through the package and know what the manufacturer provided as some of these bundled software programs can work very well for you. If you didn't get a photo editing program with your digital camera there are still plenty of other options, as there are several good free photo editing software programs available on the internet for download that will let you do more advanced editing including cropping and file resizing, color adjustments and much more.

For the average or above average photographer, there are two programs that you can also buy for around $100 that will bring almost all the features you will need to any photo editing task and they are Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro 9. Either of these programs offer more advanced features including incremental control over brightness, contrast, sharpness, color saturation and much more. They are also fairly easy to learn and use.

And then for the most demanding of photographers or professionals who work with digital images, the ultimate photo editing program is Adobe PhotoShop itself. There is almost nothing that you can't do with this program. It is extremely powerful, but also has a fairly steep learning curve, so if you don't fit into this small circle of high end users there is no real need to pony up the hundreds of dollars that will be necessary to get such an advanced program. The choices mentioned above would be a better bet for the vast majority of folks instead.

So as you can see there are several choices to be made when it comes to how you plan on editing your digital photos, and there are also plenty of digital photo editing software programs that can help you accomplish almost any editing task that you could want simply, quickly and easily. Just choose the program that best fits your individual needs as outlined in this article.

Thad Pickering writes on many consumer related topics including digital photography. You can find the best photo editing software and photo editing programs by visiting our Digital Photography website.