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Contrast adjustments can turn a flat-looking photo into something entirely different.

Levels are the basic tool used by Photoshop and Elements to correct shadows, midtones, and highlights in your images. The first stop for a levels adjustment should be the Auto Levels command, found by clicking Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels.

The final three controls shared by all versions of Camera Raw are Sharpening, Luminance Smoothing, and Color Noise Reduction.

Let's start with a few basic philosophies for making corrections. (Note that many of these techniques apply to much more than color corrections.)

One thing I have found quite useful and a real timesaver is to keep a library of shadows. I keep a few basic shadows on file and repurpose them instead of having to recreate them from scratch each time a new image comes in. This is particularly useful for car images, but you may find other uses for them. I usually keep them as a fairly large file, but the nice thing about a shadow is that it can be resized quite considerably, 200% or more, and the image doesn't really degrade all that much. Ad...

With every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. This applies to shadows as well. If you place a shadow underneath an object, some of this shadow should be reflected back onto the object, thus anchoring the object to Shadows the shadow and the surface on which it sits. Without this anchoring effect, objects will appear as if they are hovering (an effect you wouldn't want unless you were trying to make an object appear as though it were floating.

Sometimes your client has an image in which he would like to have the object cropped out of the background but retain the shadow. If the object is on a light background, this is generally a simple matter of dropping out the background.

Creating a shadow for a complex object is a little more involved than the freehand shading we've done so far. In this section, we'll create a shadow for a more intricate object.

Let's start our shadow work by creating a basic shadow for some strawberries. Our unretouched image, is a good example; most shadows I am asked to create are this type of simple basic shadow. Having said that though, one must pay special attention to the shape, size, and density of the shadow, as such a simple shadow on a stark background will look really out of place if it isn't correct.

Let's face it, sometimes photos don't do people justice, and a wrong setting on the camera or an unflattering angle can make their nose look bigger than it really is. Fortunately, Photoshop makes digital plastic surgery a breeze without the need for any fancy surgical tools or even a steady hand!

Photo by swanky Should I use my camera’s Portrait mode when shooting Portraits or would I be better off manually setting my camera up? Unless you have a high end DSLR, most digital cameras these days come with an array of shooting modes (including portrait mode) for a photographer to choose from when out using their camera. These shooting modes are designed to help camera owners to quickly tell their camera what type of shot they are taking to give the camera a hint at what type of effect you wa...