This effect works well with a photograph which is underexposed and could be touched up with just a little bit of levels or curves. Instead of just brightening the image which would be our natural instant, an interesting effect is to create the look of a spotlight.

1.) Begin by creating a selection with the elliptical marquee tool, Choose Select > Transform Selection and a bounding box will appear, this will give you the ability to rotate, scale and resize the selected area. 

2.) Press enter/return to apply the transformation to the selection, the next step is to create a curves adjustment layer, choose a new adjustment layer from the bottom of the layers palette and select curves.

3.) This will then open a dialog box, which is for curves, move the mouse from the box and over to the image, the cursor will then change into an eyedropper tool. 

4.) Click and drag and a circle will appear on the diagonal line of the curve. This is the tonal range of the area that you are moving the mouse over. Take a note of where the range is on the curve.

5.) Click and drag on the curve. Move the point up and notice that the image will be lightened. Looking at the layers palette, you will see the adjustment layer with a layer mask applied. Notice that the area of the mask where the selection was present is now white, click the mask to make it active. 

6.) The light edge needs to be softened, do this by choosing the options, Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur 

7.) Remove the effect from the areas that would be in shadow and not illuminated in real life, e.g. such as the air, choose black for the foreground color and select the brush tool, click and drag the paintbrush and you will paint away the adjustment from the regions you desire because you are painting on a mask 

8.) And that should be it! This is a great effect and you can lower the opacity of the adjustment layer if you desire to tone down the effect a little, a great way to draw attention to certain areas of an image.

This is a list of my favorite and most used Photoshop keyboard shortcuts and there’s nothing more damaging to your productivity than doing everything the long way round when using a programme. Searching for tools or buttons is a task that can easily be bypassed with some quick memorization of shortcuts.

Undo, Multiple Times – (Ctrl + Alt + Z)

Most programs allow you to press (Ctrl + Z) multiple times to perform multiple Undo’s, but Photoshop requires (Alt), otherwise you’ll just keep undoing then re-doing then undoing then re-doing then undoing then re-doing.

Hand/Move Tool – (Spacebar)

Holding the spacebar will turn your cursor into the hand in almost any situation… when using different tools, with dialog boxes open, etc… allowing you to quickly navigate your document no matter what you’re doing.

Switch Document Windows – (Ctrl + Tab)

Your Photoshop workspace can become a mess when working on multiple files, so being able to switch windows quickly is a must.

New Layer – (Ctrl + Shift + N) – with dialog?(Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N) – without dialog

Layers are the greatest thing(s) ever invented in any (design) program and being able to manage your layers properly is important.

Duplicate Layer – (Ctrl + J) – without dialog?(Ctrl + Alt + J) – with dialog

You can duplicate an entire layer, or, if you have a selection, the selection will be duplicated to it’s own layer. This is great when trying different techniques or effects without having to worry about errors.

Re-run Filter/ Fade Filter -  (Ctrl + F) – run filter again?(Ctrl + Alt + F) – run filter again, with dialog?(Ctrl + Shift + F) – fade filter

Even though Photoshop provides preview windows in the dialog box for most filters, there’s still no true way of telling whether you’ve achieved your desired effect until you see the full image. If something goes wrong, you can quickly undo, then go back to your filter and try again without having to go through the hassle of moving your cursor. 

This tutorial works with images that have a good range of hightlights/midtones/shadows but lack of shadows obscuring any parts of the face if you are using this effect on an image of a person. Other images may need a lot of color correcting before they could be made suitable for use in this tutorial, especially as regards shadows on the face. Choose your images wisely before starting the tutorial. 

1.) Open your image. Duplicate the background layer and give it a useful name. Save to PSD to get your working file established.

2.) Make sure your new layer (not the background) is highlighted and run menu option Image > Adjustments > Threshold… The default value in the Threshold dialog box is 128 and then increase or decrease the threshold until you are satisfied with how it looks then press OK. 

3.) Highlight the threshold layer and go to Filter > Stylize > Diffuse then Select Anisotropic mode and press OK.

4.) Run menu option Select > Color Range and use the eyedropper to sample the black portion of the image, then run the Fuzziness slider in the Color Range dialog box up to 200. Press OK. The black portion of the image should now be surrounded by marching ants.

5.) Run menu option Select > Save Selection and give the selection a name and press OK. Press CTRL-D to deselect. You will reload the selection later.

6.) Make a new layer on top of the others. Select the Paint Bucket tool. Set the tool to fill with a pattern rather than a color and fill the new layer. You can use one of Photoshop’s built-in patterns. 

7.) Make another new layer on top of the others and fill it with white. Add a layer mask to this layer by pressing the Add Layer Mask button on the Layers palette.

8.) Run menu option Select > Load Selection and choose the selection you saved earlier from the dropdown menu in the Load Selection dialog box and press OK.

9.) Go to Edit > Fill and fill the selection with black (which should correspond to your current background color if the mask layer is highlighted). Though you’ve filled the selection with black, you won’t see black in the image. What you should see is the pattern fill from the layer below showing through where the selected mask was filled. Press CTRL-D to deselect. 

10.) With the mask layer still highlighted, select the Brush tool and choose a large, hard-edged brush – around size 19. Painting on the mask with white as the foreground color, paint over those parts of the image you might not need, assuming you see extra stuff that doesn’t need to be there.

Auto Color

Image > Adjustments > Auto Color (Ctrl + Shift + B) For those of you that are professionals in the color-correcting field, this is a great feature to sometimes fix the poor colors a digital camera can capture.

Auto Levels

Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels or (Ctrl + Shift + L)?This is another quick way to do some minor color-correcting on your images. What this does is correct the black point and white point in your image automatically. It’s looking for the nearest-to-white color and setting that as the white point, then finding the nearest-to-black.

Auto Contrast

Image > Adjustments > Auto Contrast or (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + L) Auto contrast is another quick adjustment for Photoshop to automatically color correct your image. You usually don’t need to use this with Auto Levels, but sometimes it helps for images that look a bit more washed-out than you’d like.

Auto-Align Layers

Edit > Auto-Align Layers This feature is pretty cool as it attempts to align the content on your layers as close as Photoshop can figure out. When you run this command you’ll get a set of options as to how you want Photoshop to try to align. You’ll need to have your layers selected in the Layers palette by Ctrl-clicking or Shift-clicking on the layers. This is pretty much your savior for stitching together panoramas.

Auto-Blend Layers

Edit > Auto-blend Layers ?Like Auto-Align, this feature is probably most useful in photography situations. When stitching together a panorama, it will attempt to match and blend the color across all of your layers to make sure your stitch looks seamless.

Vertical + Horizontal Centering

Layer > Align > (options)…?This one is great when mocking up a new website design. This will allow you to align things vertically and horizontally to the center, left, right and top. Make sure your text layer is higher in your layers palette than the one you want to align with. Click on both layers by control-clicking or shift-clicking.

Vertical + Horizontal Centering (to a selection)

Layer > Align to Selection > (options)…?If you don’t have another layer you want to align something to, you can make a section and align your object to the selection. Just make sure the layer you want to align is selected in the Layers palette before going to the Layer menu.

Straighten Crooked Photos

You’ll want to start with the Ruler tool (located under the Eyedropper [I]) and draw a line for your horizontal axis to be straightened. After drawing your line, go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. Photoshop will have automatically entered the angle in degrees needed to straighten your image, so just click OK. After running this you will have white areas in the corners, so be prepared to crop a bit.