Dense sub-graphs of sparse graphs (communities), which appear in most real-world complex networks, play an important role in many contexts. Most existing community detection algorithms produce a hierarchical structure of communities and seek a partition into communities that optimizes a given quality function. We propose new methods to improve the results of any of these algorithms. First we show how to optimize a general class of additive quality functions (containing the modularity, the performance, and a new similarity based quality function which we propose) over a larger set of partitions than the classical methods. Moreover, we define new multi-scale quality functions which make it possible to detect different scales at which meaningful community structures appear, while classical approaches find only one partition.