These days, it's come to be expected that most mobile devices come with a camera. Everything from laptops to smartphones have a camera built-in. And that's given rise to the amateur photographer. Whether posting snaps to Flickr or 4chan, reporting the news on the scene for a blog, or taking personal photos to share with friends, digital photography has seeped into Internet culture, and its here to stay.

But we've noticed, judging from the quality of pictures we've seen online anyway, that some of you seem to need a few pointers. So, in the interest of a more beautiful Internet for everyone, here's our list of general tips for taking the best digital photos.

Rule of thumb: Natural daylight is best. If indoors, light from a window is second best. Lacking that, use either incandescent light bulbs, or flame - such as from a fireplace or candles. Fluorescent lighting, such as what you find in an office, is the absolute worst for digital photographs, especially when photographing a person. It makes the subject look like a washed-out zombie. You have every gray hair and wrinkle coming out in bold lines, and the skin color always comes out looking dead.

Zooming: Optical zooms are the best, but they're rare on mobile devices. Digital zooming is available everywhere, but actually it's the same thing as taking a regular picture and blowing it up in Photoshop. Which, as you know, will hurt your resolution - eventually you get to having blotchy pixels in the image. So use zoom with care; you can always post-process it later.

Megapixels: The more, the better. This relates to the point about zooming; cameras with a high megapixel rating will be able to capture images at a higher resolution. This isn't something you can adjust; it's a feature of your camera at the time you bought it, so look for the highest rating you can find. You should look for a rating between 2 and 4 MP. You can go higher - up to 6 or so - but unless you're wanting to make blown-up, poster-size prints to hang on the wall, it won't be necessary. Wikipedia has an excellent write-up about pixels.

ISO: On cameras, this rates how sensitive the camera is to light. The higher the ISO setting, the better your photographs will turn out in low-light conditions. You want the ISO to be 100 or above. Under 100, and you'll have a tough time getting a decent image in anything but broad daylight.

Personal portraits: Online dating is no longer a curiosity; it's now the most common way to meet people. Every online personals site will have a way for you to upload a photo. Just because it doesn't seem to go without saying, we'll say it here: Dress nice, be in a clean room, don't have the brightest light to your back, and try to smile if you could. And try to get someone else to take the picture. A photo of yourself posing in the bathroom mirror holding the camera tells the whole world that you couldn't even scrounge up one single real-life friend to take the picture for you, and that just reeks of loneliness and desperation. The same goes for holding the camera pointed at yourself without a mirror - now we have a picture of you with your arms out, and probably with the top of your head cut off, too.

Some "gotchas": Look out for reflective surfaces in the image frame, which will bounce the light around in unexpected ways, particularly if you're using flash. Try to hold the camera still - either use a solid object to steady the camera, or at least cut back on the caffeine before you go photographing. Look out for people in the background - you've seen those pictures on the social web where somebody took a wedding-day photo on the beach and there, behind the lovebirds, some college fratboy had to jump up and moon the camera. Look out for jokers like that.

We're going to go out on a limb here and say that Photoshop is probably the best-known graphics editing program out there. But it's a top-dollar item. And really, it isn't the best solution for everybody, with its steep learning curve. There's plenty of competitors to Adobe's flagship product out there, and some of them are very attractive competitors. Most of them are even free, if that got your attention...

Gimp - The number one competitor to Adobe Photoshop. Gimp and Photoshop share 95% of their features - what you can do with one, you can do with the other. Gimp is actually simpler to learn than Photoshop, although users who are used to Photoshop struggle with it because that's all they know how to do. Gimp also has some unique features - a scheme-like scripting language, a huge base of plug-ins, and it is not only free to download, but licensed as GPL free software.

GimpShop For ex-Adobe users who just can't get used to the way Gimp does things, there's GimpShop. Same functionality as Gimp, an interface like Photoshop. Free GPL.

CinePaint Put a little Hollywood magic on your desktop! CinePaint started out as a fork from the Gimp many years ago, but has since been taken in a whole new direction. It is maintained by the film studio production industry itself; it is used in feature motion picture work to process filmed images. It has a host of features supporting every aspect of high-definition film and print work. Pretty much every blockbuster Hollywood film you've seen that had special effects in it was processed in CinePaint. Free GPL.

Paint.NET As the name suggests, Paint.NET uses Microsoft's .NET framework 2.0. Produced as a State University project as a replacement for Microsoft Windows Paint, it has since gone on to be a very handy raster image editor which is catching up to the Gimp, but maintains the minimalism of Windows Paint. MIT license, free to download.

Picasa This is not a full-feature image editor, but it's a very handy tool just for manipulating personal photos. It can do some basic photo-editing filtering, rotating, cropping, and framing, but where it really shines is its capacity to automatically search and catalog every image on your machine, and make them all easy to find. It also shines for composing albums and sharing photos socially. From Google, and as you'd expect is very easy to learn. Free to download, but proprietary licensed.

Pixel Image Editor With a generic-sounding name like that, you might just miss this one. Also, it's not free; but it only costs a measly $32 USD! Pixel is praised across the Internet as being the budget image editing solution. It packs a pile of features into a rather light-weight program. It's license is proprietary, but $32 is almost free anyway.

With the possible exception of the Gimp family, each of these is far lighter-weight than Adobe Photoshop, making them ideal for subnotebooks. All of these at least run on Microsoft Windows systems; most will run on Mac and Linux as well.

The thing to remember when picking out an image editor is, what do you need it for? There's a huge range of graphics tools out there, and most people who get image software only have a specific purpose in mind, such as managing photos or making headers and banners for their website, or even making web comics. You'll want to pick the image editor that offers only the features you need, without confusing yourself with a lot of complicated features you won't use anyway. Many people seem to struggle with learning new image editors, so give yourself time, understand that it takes some learning, and read the manual.

Once you got that new digital camera, or smartphone with built-in photo capability, I'll bet you ran around excited with it. You snapped the kids, the cat, and all of you and emailed the photo to every relative on your list. You rushed to the mall with that stand that prints up T-shirts while you wait and got a shirt with your likeness on it. Your girlfriend, if you're in that stage of life, posed just for you, and now she's ticked because the photo got all over the Internet.

Now, you probably only think to carry it around or bring it out for those odd jobs where you want to grab an image to blog or tweet about later. "Hey!", you'll say, "This rainbow just formed over my house!" or "I was quite taken aback to discover this crocodile in my bathtub this morning." or even "Look what I caught THIS senator doing!" or whatever other amazing thing you encounter.

But here's a list of things to do with a digital camera that will make you say, "Why didn't I think of that?"

- Take a photo of your rental car, inside and out, before you drive it, and afterwards just before you return it. There, there can no longer be an argument about exactly what wear and tear on the car is and isn't your fault.

- Take a picture of a list. This is much faster than writing it down or transferring the text file from one machine to another. This is great for taking a copy of recipes to the store while you shop. It's also great for taking instructions from the computer that works, where somebody posted in reply to your question on the Internet, and going to the computer that doesn't work, where you have to use the instructions.

- Speaking of computers, if you do any work inside the case, take a photo before you take it apart, so you'll remember where all those wires go when you put it back together. This also works well for auto mechanic work.

- Win arguments at the check-out stand. When an item on the store shelf is labeled with one price but the check-out rings it up at a higher price, now you have evidence on the spot to show them.

- Legal defense. Since photos are so cheap and fast to make, there's nothing like a quick image of a scene that looks like it might be trouble, before you get into it. Great for liability purposes.

- By the way, reach for your camera first instead of your pad and pen when you need the license plate of the car that just hit you.

- Here's one for those huge parking lots like you find at airport long-term parking or Disneyland: snap a photo of the sign by your parking section, so you can find the poor thing again.