What are the dots/square that show up in my pictures?

I take pictures with an Olympus C-3040Zoom 3.3 Megapixel camera. I transfer them to my PC via a Dazzle card reader. I then open them with Adobe Elements 2.0. Many of these pictures contain inperfections that show up as dots or squares. When enlarged they look a little like a military ribbon. What are these and how can I avoid or remove them?

Thank you for any help provided.

Pamela,

Could it be that you have zoomed up the image so much that you are looking at individual pixels?

Robert

Pamela, in addition to what Robert said, have you set your camera's resolution to the highest/finest setting? Some people set their resolution lower so that they can fit as many photos as possible on a memory card, but this makes the pictures look much worse. Make sure it's set to the highest resolution and the finest quality.

Lou