By Dan Simmons Click reporter

However expensive or fancy your digital camera might be, everybody makes mistakes. The beauty of digital is that you can usually just have another go. But what if that once-in-a-lifetime shot comes around - and things do not go quite the way you had hoped?

Digital photos can easily be improved with software

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so it is funny how just two or three words come to mind when you have really mucked it up.

Most mistakes, though, are not fatal. In fact most snaps just need some emergency attention before anyone else gets to see them.

Jon Adams, the editor of Digital Photo magazine, explained some of the quickest ways to transform our dodgy pictures into something more presentable.

He started with a piece of software that is completely free - Google's Picasa, available from the Google website. (You can best appreciate Jon's demonstrations, which are necessarily very visual, by clicking the "Latest programme" button on the right-hand side of this page.)

Picasa's layout is simple with basic correction tools on the left-hand side. Redeye caused by flash can be solved easily in Picasa by drawing a box around the eyes.

Quick fix?

Other programs identify the eyes for you, offering a one-click solution; one of the programs we tested - Photoshop Elements - automatically removes red-eye on the fly as you download the pictures.

But be warned: quick fixes are not always perfect.

They are the software's "best guess" and when we tried Picasa it did not quite remove all the red.

No matter how black an image looks there is often enough information there for adjustments to brightness and contrast to make a difference.

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There are many other free picture editing programs on the net, but it's fair to say that commercial software gives you more features, greater flexibility and usually much better results. Corel's Paint Shop Pro 10 comes in at around US $100.

Jon Adams says: "One of the great things about Paint Shop Pro is the learning centre, so you don't actually need to know anything about the software or about photography to start using it.

"It brings up the tools you need to use and then you can start using them because it tells you how. If you want to adjust your photos, for example, it gives you all the instructions."

Once you have cropped, brightened and adjusted the picture to your satisfaction it is time for the glossy makeover.

First, the toothbrush tool helps whiten teeth and the whites of the eyes. The tan brush is especially useful for those who like to holiday in the UK!

Creative masterpieces

Finally a quick look at the edit suite that the print industry uses - Photoshop. The full version costs around $1,000, but Photoshop Elements has most of the bits amateurs need for around the $100 mark.

Elements' dedicated skin tones palette lets you adjust pictures for a more natural effect with one click in instances where you find faces whitened out by the flash.

Blemishes can easily be removed - this time with a healing brush tool that uses the colour and textures in similar areas of the picture to smooth things over.

Jon Adams says: "Cameras often get fooled by bright backgrounds. The metering system inside them takes it as the image and forgets the foreground subject.

"If we go to Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Shadow Highlights then we can actually adjust our foreground in comparison to the background."

We all have pictures that are not quite in focus. If your photo is not too blurred, many applications like Elements have a sharpening tool or filter.

Even the blandest of pictures can be quickly turned into creative masterpieces with this sort of software.