• Whether you're new to tinkering around with your digital photos or have been a long-time lover of tweaking and enhancing your snapshots, Adobe Photoshop, part of the Adobe Creative Suite, offers a collection of tools and filters to help you with your work. You're no longer tied down to exactly what was on the other end of your lens when you snapped the shutter or took the picture. Your photos may be manipulated and changed to how you envisioned them when you lined up the shot, even if Mother Nature didn't cooperate or the coloring just didn't work out.
  
  

Color Quick Change

• If a color in your photo just seems to clash, or you wanted another shade or hue for your magazine layout, you're not stuck with what you've got. You also don't need to reshoot; just take advantage of Photoshop's quick color changes. Once you've got a photo open in the Photoshop workspace, you'll find Photoshop's "Lasso" tool, located on the "Tools" palette on the left side of the screen, a trusted ally. The "Lasso" works as you draw an outline around part of the picture. Once you've made the outline, blinking dotted lines appear, signifying the selected area. Photoshop's "Image" menu at the top of the screen offers the "Adjust" sub-menu with a "Hue/Saturation" option. The "Hue/Saturation" window, particularly the "Hue" slider bar, is where you'll be able to make the most realistic quick color changes. Just slide the "Hue" bar to the left or right, and the area you selected completely changes colors--all the way through the rainbow. Once you find your preferred hue, make a note of the color's number and re-use it throughout your image.
  
  

Magic Eraser

• It may seem like magic when you use Photoshop's "Clone" tool, but you're actually just copying and pasting image pixels. The "Clone" tool, also located on the "Tools" palette, looks like a stamper you might use to cancel checks. It's best used to eliminate flaws from an image, such as dust specks from the camera, spots on a person's face, or even a stray bird that flew into your sky picture. To work your "magic," just click the "Clone" tool on a section of the picture similar to the one with the flaw. For example, if you want to remove the bird from your sky photo, you'd click the "Clone" tool on a section of the blue sky without the bird, right next to the area with the bird. This copies the "good" sky into Photoshop's memory. Your next step is to click your cursor directly on the "bad" spot (in this case, the bird) and the copied pixels are pasted directly on top, erasing the bird as if it was never there. The copy is seamless, meaning you can't tell anything has been changed, which results in a photo without flaws.
  
  

Filters

• The "Filter" menu at the top of the Photoshop workspace may seem at first like just a word, but it drops down to reveal a huge collection of ways you can transform your photos. In fact, with one single digital photo, you can have a watercolor, oil painting, engraved brass chrome plate, neon sign, mosaic tiles, overexposed negative, burlap design, and chalk outlines, just by using the filters. Each filter comes with a variety of slider bars and input boxes, putting you in complete control of the design. For example, the "Glowing Edges" filter box offers three slider bars, where you decide how thick your photo's neon tubes will be, whether they pick up every edge or just the thickest lines, and how bright the tubes will glow. After you make your adjustments, your photo turns into a blazing neon sign reminiscent of a trip down the Las Vegas strip.