Repair Bad Photos

Everyone's got 'em--those awful pictures you don't show anyone because they came out too dark, too bright, or some ugly shade of green. But don't throw them away--you can easily salvage many of your bad pictures. And while they may never be good enough to frame in the family room, you can probably post them on Web pages or send them to friends in electronic greeting cards.

To get started, you'll need some kind of image editing program to tweak your photos. My favorites include Adobe PhotoShop LE, Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo-Paint, and Ulead PhotoExpress. If you're just getting started, it doesn't matter much which program you use; they all have the power to make minor changes to your pictures.

Level a Crooked Picture

There's nothing quite as annoying as a crooked picture, especially when the horizon or some other straight line goes through your scene. Luckily, you can straighten it out in a heartbeat. Use the rotate tool in your image editor and specify how much to spin the picture. But here's a secret: Most errors, even seemingly egregious ones, are rarely off by more than a degree or two. Try rotating the image and, if you didn't get it quite right, undo your edit and try again. Always start over using the Undo tool; if you keep rotating and rotating an image, you'll introduce visible errors into the picture.

Brighten a Gloomy Photo

Maybe the flash didn't reach the subject, or perhaps the camera underexposed the subject because of a bright background. I've even tested cameras that seem predisposed to under-exposing pictures a bit. But a little brightness can salvage images that are visibly too dark. Don't use the brightness and contrast tools, though: The gamma control is a much better option.

Why gamma? Aside from the fact that it has a cool name, gamma adjustments affect the mid-tone of an image more than the extreme dark and light ends of the spectrum. That means you can brighten skin tones without washing out deep shadows or overexposing the sky. In other words, gamma has less chance of ruining your photo through over-correction.

Adjust Your Color Balance

Pictures that are a little too blue or green or red can be fixed, but it takes a creative eye and a steady hand to do it well. To fix out-of-sync colors, you'll need to open the color balancing tools in your image editor. Usually, you'll see a dialog box that displays three sliders--one for each of the primary colors.

If your picture is too blue, pull back on the blue slider a little, and increase the red and green sliders by the same small amount. If it's too red, decrease the red but increase green and blue. You get the idea--but whatever you do, be conservative and only move the sliders a little. You'll probably never have to change the colors in an image by more than about 10 percent. If you do, you probably took the picture on Mars, and it's worth saving for that reason alone.