The most common corrections made in Photoshop are for exposure, focus and the removal of red eye. Purists would have to decry this altering of the captured image but so far we have not heard any complaints about the automated routines built into photo editing software.

The digital puritans who ask the question have no appreciation of the way photography has always worked, even in the film era. We cropped, burned and dodged to alter point of view or tonal qualities. We played with colour filtration when printing from transparencies. We retouched and spotted to remove warts, hairs and wrinkles.

Where once we flattered subjects with Vaseline these days we use a Photoshop Action like Edgarian Blur (www.atncentral.com) which allows for fine control of the blurring effect. We get rid of warts in a nonce with the Photoshop Healing Tool, where once we would have spotted and scratched the print.

There are some tricks available to the digital photographer that Ansel Adams didn’t know about, for instance compressing the sky or foreground of a picture. Sometimes the area of sky is too great compared with the foreground landscape. The simplest solution is to crop the image, but that may cut off some lovely sunset clouds and there is another way. Select the sky area almost down to the horizon and then click on Edit/Transform/Scale and drag the top margin down until the picture looks better. The cloud mass is unnaturally compressed but it looks dramatic.

“Until the picture looks better”? Well, as another professional photographer said when asked an esoteric question about his Photoshop technique: “Don’t ask me. I just fiddle with it until it looks good.”

A typical post-camera processing of an image starts with cropping the picture to produce the best composition. We usually sharpen the original using the Unsharp Mask filter, or, in our case Fred Miranda’s Intellisharpen II. This strange term “unsharp mask” is a hangover from film days when photographers saved out-of-focus images by creating an intermediate mask to remove unsharpness. In effect it sharpens the distinct edges in the picture without over-sharpening flat and textured surfaces. Unlike the chap in the darkroom we can easily control the degree of sharpening.

Then we play with Curves to adjust the brightness and contrast to give the image more zap -- just like choosing the right contrast paper in the darkroom. After that a judicious increase in colour saturation via the Image/Adjustments/Hue and Saturation tool adds richness to the picture. Or, with some portraits, a reduction in colour saturation makes for more natural skin tones.

There are times when some unsightly object spoils the picture and we need to remove it altogether. Not a problem. Using the Clone tool we can make it look as though the ugly garbage tin was never there in the first place.

Photography, as an art form, never has finished the moment the shutter button is pressed. Serious photographers have always regarded that as only an intermediate step between visualising the image, positioning the camera, taking the picture, processing the film and printing the picture.

(The processes described here are all part Photoshop CS2 and most of them are also found in Photoshop Elements 4.)

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