Alright Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my touch-up

Do you use the photo albums in Google+? Perhaps you use Instant Upload from your phone to capture lots of memories, and later collect them into albums. Or you have a more traditional camera, and you upload pictures periodically. Or perhaps you take part in #BlastFromThePast and you're scanning all those photos from when you were 7... No matter what you do, here are a couple of tips for working with photos in Google+.

First, Google+ is pretty flexible about what format the pictures can be in. GIF, JPG, and PNG are popular formats that you may be familiar with, but you can also upload the RAW format that many cameras support - but Google may convert any of these formats to another format for display, and the results may not be as good as you'd like.

Remember that you can upload an unlimited number of photos - but the pictures can be no bigger than 2048 by 2048 pixels. This is about 4 Megapixels, using digital camera lingo. If you upload a larger picture, Google will resize it so the longest edge is 2048 pixels. While their algorithm is pretty good about scaling things, you may want to do some editing yourself.

Speaking of editing, there are some pretty good editing tools built into Google+. These are available from the Edit Photo button that is in the upper left corner of your pictures when you're flipping through your album. (This is sometimes known as the Lightbox View of your pictures.) Based on the old Picnik tools that worked with Picasa, you will need Flash to do the editing.  You can apply a number of special effects (sepia tones, funky colors, polaroid effects, and more), adjust the brightness, blur portions of the image, eliminate some blemishes, crop and rotate the picture, add text, and do other editing. When you're done, you can either save over the original, or save a copy.

When your photo is picture perfect, share it in an album... but don't be surprised if it shows up again in your stream hours or days later. When an individual photo gets it's first +1, it may be automatically shared to everyone permitted to see it - think of this as very positive endorsement of the picture.

Go ahead... take those amazing cat pictures and share them with the world. You know you want to.