Make low-resolution digital photos big enough to print without getting blocky pixels.

The holidays are a time for colorful gifts, candy canes, and holiday pictures. And with a little attention to exposure settings and shooting techniques, you can capture great holiday photos you’ll want to share.

Worried about photo theft? See if your photos are posted on the Web.

You can use these tips over and over again this fall, whether you’re shooting Halloween, Chanukah, Christmas, or New Year’s events.

Everyone loves photos with a sharply defined subject and a blurry, indistinct background. This powerful photographic effect has been used for ages–and it’s shallow depth of field at work. Not sure what depth of field is all about?This week, I’ve rounded up four ways for you to take control of the depth of field in your photos.

You’ll never be able to detect the difference between an eight-megapixel and a 12-megapixel photo when looking at the picture on a computer screen, for example, because your monitor only shows about one or two megapixels of information anyway. So unless you’re making poster-sized prints or doing a lot of deep zooming and cropping, who cares how many pixels there are?

This week, I thought it would be fun to do it the old-fashioned way and actually “paint” with a flashlight.

Use Adobe Photoshop Elements or another image editor to add picture frames, drop shadows, and other border effects to digital photos.

Cool fx is a image-editing app by photo industry veterans The Tiffen Company. In its App Store description, Cool fx promises to simulate different colour and black-and-white photographic looks, diffusion, motion picture and film stocks, and optical lab processes. It certainly delivers on that promise –perhaps too much so for some users.

Image stabilization technology in cameras and in lenses has revolutionized digital photography, enabling photographers to get dramatically sharper photos without hauling around a tripod. But it’s not obvious how to use a digital SLR’s image-stabilized lens–after all, the very fact that it has an on/off switch implies you shouldn’t leave the feature on all the time.