Took some great pictures and want to show them off right away? Follow these essential tips to prepare your digital images before you send them. Your recipients will be glad you did.

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.)

All you need is an image editor that lets you rotate pictures a degree at a time, and most programs have this feature hidden somewhere in the Edit or Image menus. Look for an option to rotate the picture and enter a very small value, like one degree to the left or right (depending upon which way you need to adjust the photo).

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.

In most image editors, the cropping tool lives in the tool palette and looks like a picture frame. Click the cropping icon and, as you hold your cursor down at a starting point, use the tool to draw a rectangle inside the picture. Arrange the crop mark to re-compose your photo and discard the unwanted background. To do this in Paint Shop Pro, draw your rectangle, then click the Crop Image button in the Tool Option box that floats around on the screen.

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. In Paint Shop Pro, choose Effects, Enhance Photo, Red-Eye Removal, then zoom in on the red eyes and create a circle of color directly over the red spot.

6. Would You Like Text With That Photo?

You can add a caption to identify the people in the picture, the location, or the date of the event using almost any image editor. Find the Text tool in your program’s tool palette. In most programs, the icon is often the letter A or T. Enter the text you want, and set the font and text size to your liking. Look for a fat font, because skinny ones are often hard to read in a digital picture.

7. Make Your Pictures E-Mail-Friendly

When your photo is finally ready to send, be considerate to your recipient by resizing it for e-mail. If you attach a bunch of huge 3-megapixel images to an e-mail message, you can bog down your recipient’s in-box with a huge file. The message will take a long time to send and receive as well. Also it is important to remember that most email providers will only accept a maximum file size of 10 MB

8. Create Easy File Names

After you download your digital pics, you’ll probably end up with file names consisting of zeros and other random digits or letters. When sending your photos as attachments, be sure to rename the files so that they make some sense. "SteveWithCake.jpg" is instantly recognizable, while "00000203l.jpg" looks like something that belongs in some obscure folder deep inside your computer’s system files.

Speaking of attachments, how your friends and family receive your photos at the other end is another matter. Preferences vary. Some people prefer an attachment rather than a direct paste of your photo in the body of the e-mail message; images pasted into the e-mail can be too hard to tinker with at the other end. Consider this before you paste the photo into the e-mail. (Even better: Ask people what they prefer.)

Remember that even if you do send your photos as attachments, images often get pasted into the e-mail automatically at the other end if your recipient’s e-mail program is configured for HTML mail.

9. Do a Rehearsal: E-Mail Yourself

If you want to make sure your friends will speak to you again after they receive your first set of digital pics, why not e-mail the batch to yourself? It never hurts to do a run-through, until you get the hang of it. You’ll get to see first-hand what your photos look like at the other end.

If your e-mail program hangs while you’re trying to open your message, then you know that something is up. Just go back and see if some resizing will solve the problem.