Removing Excess Space Above and Below Figure Captions in LaTeX

I recently started learning and using LaTeX for a conference paper I’m writing, after years of resisting the advice of friends to use it instead of Microsoft Word.  Some things have been easy, and some things have been really tough to figure out.  One tough thing that took me a while to figure out, and which I had to piece together from several desperate Google page results, is how to get rid of that very annoying excessive white space above and below captions for figure floats in LaTeX.

To do this, I placed the following two lines right before the caption within the figure object:

setlength{abovecaptionskip}{-11pt}
setlength{belowcaptionskip}{-8pt}

You can change the -11pt and -8pt values to whatever works for you.  I found plenty of websites describing these commands, but almost none showed that you could make these values NEGATIVE.  That was the breakthrough.  So alternatively, if you want to add space, make these larger positive values.