Eventually I decided to ignore nearly all of the options. It was kind of like hiring Annie Leibovitz to take your passport photo. I concentrated instead on a few useful ways of fine-tuning my pictures. One was simply to rotate images 90 degrees so that vertically-oriented photos I took with the camera turned sideways appeared correctly on my computer screen. After I finally got comfortable with the basics, I moved on to some of Photo-Deluxe's snazzier effects.
Digital images are infinitely malleable.
On the more useful side, there are tools to erase red eye or other photo blemishes. Sending Your Snapshots With pictures of Abby stored safely on my hard drive, I was ready to start beaming them to everyone who was interested. To send the pictures by e-mail, all I needed to do was attach the photo files to my message. On my e-mail program, Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook 98, that means clicking an icon depicting a paper clip, then showing the program where the file is located on the hard drive. Sending these photos, I thought, is a breeze.