The pictures come from a digital camera often need some post-processing. I usually do these steps:
Crop and rotate (to correct the horizon tilt)
Correct the black/white point (or auto-correction) and white balance (to remove the color shift of the neutral grays)
Remove the noise if necessary
It's always a matter of taste and experience which software fits you best. I've tried the following ones:
PhotoShop: The most complete image manipulation software with tons of tools. I only suggest it for advanced users. When saving images do not use the 'Save for Web' tool for that will strip all metadata (i.e. photographic information, including the 'original date taken' field, which is needed to sort your images in the gallery). PhotoShop is a commercial software fo $649, but PhotoShop Elements with a limited functionality is just $99. See here.
ACDSee: A general purpose image-manipulation / organizing software for users of all experience levels. Also good for mass-renaming or correcting the camera date for all pictures in a push of a button, if you forgot to change in an other time zone. Shareware
$69.99 — download here.
Picassa: Fast, and intuitive user interface, lots of goodies. I don't like the way of handling the folders — it's not the way the operating system does and caused me a lot of confusion. Also the program applies the several corrections only at a later point when the user hits the "Export" button — which is good in theory — but you need to be aware of this. Free program — download here.
If you have copied the originals in the new folder you can overwite them when saving. You don't even have to resize them, because JAlbum will do it for you, but if you don't want JAlbum to do it, you can do it here. I always keep the original resolution files of the corrected files too.
Tips & Tricks 
