Photoshop

An important thing to remember when retouching photos is to exercise a little restraint. You probably don't want to retouch a subject so much that they cease to resemble themselves. Take this photo of a beautifully freckled woman. If we remove her freckles completely, it wouldn't look like her.

Softening her skin, thereby lessening the intensity of her freckles, is what we really want to do. Sound hard? It's really not. Like most things, there's a trick to it.

One of my readers works takes photos of dogs for shelters. She sent in this photo of Abbey, who suffers from the animal version of red-eye: the dreaded white-eye. This is actually worse because there's literally no pixels to work with. The red-eye tool won't work, because the problem area isn't red. The color replacement brush won't work, because there's no color to replace.

However, the area that's turning white is the pupil, so all we really have to do is select the white and make it black. Here's how to do it.

In most situations oversharpening is a very bad thing. However, when it comes to making eyes sparkle, it's just what ye ole doctor ordered. Today I'm going to show how oversharpening just the eyes can improve a portrait by galactic amounts. It can be done in either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, and literally takes about 5 minutes.

Take this shot of a pretty blonde girl and her guitar from iStockphoto.com. It's certainly a good photo, but wait till you see it after we make her eyes all bright and super sparkly.

Photoshop can certainly be a processor hog, though with CS2 the word "hog" just doesn't quite give the devil its due. If you're lucky enough to have installed this behemoth and you find it's running as fast as molasses doesn't, here are five tips and tweaks to rev things back up.

Summer's almost over and hopefully you all crept out of your bat caves and into the great outdoors for some quality flower shooting. A nice idea for “flowerly” photos is to have a single element in focus, and the background softly blurred. In the world of photography, this technique is called a shallow depth of field, and it’s easy to attain with a digital SLR (a single-lens reflex camera, usually having interchangeable lenses). But what if you don’t have such a fancy camera? Never fear, for Photoshop is here!

Sometimes it's next to impossible to figure out which bits of an image are the blackest black, and/or the whitest white. Picking the wrong area can produce "not so correct" color correction. So how can you find out which pixels are really black, and which pixels are really white? To become a real pixel super sleuth, you need to cozy up to the Threshold dialog box.

Unfortunately, every photo-taking device, every scanner, and every lighting situation creates some type of color cast. Lucky for us, getting back to the original color is easy if you follow a few simple steps in either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Don't you hate it when you have (what *could* be) a really cute photo, except for you look like you've been awake for a week straight? Or the universe decided to bless you with the galaxy's biggest zit? What a drag. While I hope I'd never be vain enough to go for real plastic surgery (I'm a chicken when it comes to pain), I'm a *huge* fan of digital touchups.

Join me now as we use Photoshop to give this photo a much-needed digital face lift.

So this morning I'm brainstorming tutorial ideas when a friend of mine iChats me (curious how a software name can morph into an action verb). I tell him I'm busy writing and he says, "Oh I have a great tutorial idea for you. Show me how to stitch these photos together," he says and forwards these three rather uninspiring photos from a recent trip to Toronto: