The Extra-Strength Tips for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

The results of my first survey tells me that the vast majority of you (at least those who responded to the survey) are shutterbugs. So, in this installment, I'll share with you some general concepts that are great for working with photographs in general. Those of you who aren't photographers, stay with me, because you should still get something useful out of this.

If you've ever performed color correction and later noticed that the contrast of your image changed too much, then you might want to try this technique. Immediately after color correcting your image, choose Edit>Fade and set the pop-up menu to Color. This will prevent the last adjustment you made from changing the brightness or contrast of your image. If you happened to use an Adjustment Layer, then set the blending mode menu at the top of the Layers palette to luminosity to do the same thing.

If you find your image contains a bunch of multi-colored noise, then choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Increase the amount setting until all the multi-colored noise blends into the image (the image will look very blurry at this point). Then, immediately after you click ok, choose Edit>Fade Gaussian Blur and set the pop-up menu to Color. Then, if you can still see noise (it should no longer be multi-colored though), then go to the Filter>Noise menu and use either Despeckle or Median to minimize the noise.

If you have a sky that contains clouds or varies a lot in brightness, you can try the following to enhance the contrast. Select the sky, choose Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color. Set the Mode pop-up menu to Color Burn and then click ok. That should bring up a color picker. Choose a shade of gray. The darker the shade, the more you'll affect your image. If you'd like to shift the color of the sky then pick a slightly colorful grayish color.

When sharpening your image, you might notice intense colors showing up on the edge of subtly colored objects. When that happens, choose Edit>Fade right after sharpening your image, and set the pop-up menu to Luminosity. That will prevent the sharpening you just performed from shifting the colors of your image. I'd suggest you hold off on sharpening your image until it has been scaled to its final size, otherwise your sharpening will be exaggerated (if scaling up), or will be minimized (if scaling down) when the image is scaled.

If your image is slightly crooked, then grab the Measure tool (it looks like a ruler and is hidden under the Eyedropper tool in your tool palette) and draw a line across the horizon so that Photoshop knows which angle your image is at. Then choose Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary and use the default settings (which will be based on the angle of the line you made).

I'm in the middle of developing new retouching techniques that will be used in a series of CD-ROM based educational products that should be available in the next month or so. If you'd like a chance to get a FREE copy of one of these products, then please send me images that you've had retouching challenges with and I'll send you a FREE CD if I end up using your image as a project image on the CD. For details on how to submit your images, point your browser to www.digitalmastery.com/submit

I've talked a friend of mine into letting my Extra-Strength Tips subscribers into getting three free issues of Design Tools Monthly. It's the only digital imaging related publication that I read cover to cover. If you're a Mac user and would like to check it out, just point your browser to http://www.design-tools.com/3freewillmore/ It's not one of those cancel at any time offers either... it's just three free issues, no stings attached.

Oh, if you have any suggestions for future tips, please send them to tips@digitalmastery.com.

-Ben Willmore