This is part of a new ongoing series on digital photography. Look for later installments covering various aspects of the topic, from choosing a camera and editing photos to printing them.

So you've taken some photos with your new digital camera, or even with your smartphone. What next? You could simply save, share, or print them as is, but a little effort with your photo software can turn washed out, dark, or poorly framed photos into something far more pleasing and impressive. In the last installment of PCMag.com's Digital Photography Super Guide, we showed you how to effectively import and organize your pictures. This time, we'll give you some ideas for how you can get them looking their best by applying image adjustments with photo software. Here we'll discuss techniques that affect the whole image—things like cropping, brightness, contrast, color, sharpness, and noise reduction. In the next installment, we'll move on to pixel-level editing tools for things like correcting red eye and blemishes, along with other nifty effects.

Just as we saw with importing and organizing, digital photography software comes in a few different levels. At the entry level are Web and mobile apps, such as Adobe Photoshop Express, Pixlr, FotoFlexer, and LunaPic. At the next level are free and OS-included photo editors, most prominently Windows Photo Gallery, Picasa, and the Mac's iPhoto. All of these can perform the basic fixes—cropping, rotating, lighting, and color—and some will surprise you with more advanced features, such as red-eye reduction, retouching, and noise reduction. Of course, you get a lot more powerful advanced features when you move up to a software program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, ACDSee, Corel PaintShop Pro, and Serif PhotoPlus.

Another level of photo applications, more skewed to pro and pro-sumer photographers are the "photo workflow" apps, with Adobe's Lightroom the prime example. These products stress importing, organizing, outputting, and backing up your photos but they also include powerful image adjustment tools that handle all the functions just mentioned. Other products in this arena include CyberLink's PhotoDirectorVisit Site for Pricing at CyberLink, Apple's Aperture, Corel AfterShot ProSEE IT and ACDSee Pro. Above this level, and pretty much in a class of its own is Adobe Photoshop CS6, which in addition to top-notch photo adjustment and enhancing tools, also adds 3D modeling, drawing, and endless image and even video-embellishing capabilities.

So what do you do with your photos to get them looking their best? In each of the next few sections, I'll go through the major kinds of fixes that today's photo software offers. Many, if not most, of these techniques are digital carryovers from the good old days of film photography—cropping, exposure, and even sharpening, for examples. One basic concept from those days is the negative, and many photo editing apps maintain this concept, by employing a "nondestructive" editing process. All this means is that your original photo file or a copy of it remains untouched no matter how many edits you make. Some apps simply make copies, while more sophisticated ones such as the workflow apps mentioned above, don't touch the original, but instead maintain a database of your changes, which are used for display and exporting to shareable file types.

Recommended by Our Editors

Adobe Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic: Here's How to Know Which One You Actually Need

The Best Mobile Photo Editing Apps for 2026

The Best Adobe Photoshop Plug-Ins for 2026

Another note about using digital negatives: If at all possible, say you're shooting with a DSLR or higher-end mirrorless camera, it will definitely be to your advantage to shoot and import raw camera files, treating these as the negatives. Unfortunately, there isn't just one raw file type, but rather each camera maker has its own standard. For example, Canon cameras produce .CR2 raw files, Nikons produce NEF files, and Sony cameras produce ARW files. And even within these filenames, each camera model's raw files will have unique characteristics, so you have to make sure your software supports raw files from your particular model.

A raw file is considerably larger in size than the typical JPG format because it contains all of the information off your camera's light sensor. Using raw camera files means that at the editing stage, you have a lot more potential for improvement, since the standard JPG, a compressed format, throws out data that may represent the very dark or very light parts of an image. I've shot light stucco walls that, in the JPG version of the photo I saw nothing but white, but when tweaking the same shot's raw file, was able to bring out cracks and texture in the wall that had completely been lost in the JPG, for a far more convincing image.

Of course, if you're not hardcore about getting the absolute optimal image, but simply want your photos looking as good as possible, there's still plenty you can do without working with raw files. If your camera doesn't let you get at the raw files, it's still a good idea to shoot at its top resolution and quality level. We'll start with the absolute basics, and then proceed to some more advanced adjustments.