There are a lot of sites on that help you touch up your photos _ crop them, resize them, remove red eye, improve lighting and so forth. Picnik, at www.picnik.com/, is one such site and has much to offer.

In their own words, you can ''fix your photos in just one click, use advanced controls to fine-tune your results, crop, resize, and rotate in real-time, tons of special effects, from artsy to fun, astoundingly fast, right in your browser, awesome fonts and top-quality type tool, basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers, works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, no download required, nothing to install, all this for free! Want more? Upgrade to Picnik Premium for only $24.95 a year!''

I've always been fond of touching up photos, applying special filters to achieve artsy-fartsy looking pictures that look like they might be paintings or etchings. I've also found, after a long career in newspapers and media, that many photo graphs look much better after they have been properly cropped. It's useful to zero in on the subject and eliminate all the background noise. Sometimes you may want to change a photograph from horizontal to vertical, especially if it's a picture of a person standing there in front of you. By eliminating all the distracting background, the subject comes out more clearly. With a picture of a bunch of flowers, for example, you can often obtain a very special photo by cropping right down to a single flower, giving the photograph much more intensity and strength. The same can be done with people's faces. As you experiment, you will be amazed at how ordinary photos can be turned into little works of art.

At sites like Picnik, and with programs like Google's Picasa (which I highly recommend), you can adjust the lighting in the picture to save dark pictures, or decrease the lighting if the light is too bright. Sometimes you can drain the picture of colour for a black and white shot that might look nicer than its original colour. You can also harden or soften the edges of a photograph, sharpening the subjects or making them less formal.

With Picnik, you can grab photos from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, MySpace and more, or upload them directly from your computer. Available in a variety of languages.