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.

1.) The first step is to get two images to work with. Make sure they are both in the same resolution, 72 dpi if you are using them for the web, and RGB colour mode, then open both documents in Photoshop.

2.) We will want to combine both images into one document. Now select the move tool “V” key. Drag one image into the other window and a new layer will be created automatically with the new layer on top. To center the new image in the window hold down the Shift key while dragging.

3.) Click on the add layer mask button, this will create a new layer mask. A layer mask is transparent. When you paint black into the mask it allows the image underneath to show through. Where it is white, the underlying layer will be hidden.

4.) Press the “G” key to select the gradient tool. Make sure the fore and backgrounds are set to black and white. Select linear gradient and foreground to background. Now drag the gradient diagonally across the image.

5.) You can see the gradient in the layer thumbnail and the result on the image. Where it is white, the top image shows and where it is darker the back shows through. Experiment with differant angles. You may also use any of the brush tools on the mask. Black will “paint away” the image and white will “paint it back”. Use a soft brush for best results.

6.) For an interesting variation change the layer blending mode to multiply. This makes the top image appear as if it is a reflection.

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.

This tutorial will teach you how to add colour onto an old photograph that may of lost colour through fading or an image that is originally black and white or greyscale, sometimes this can take a lot of time but the more time spent the better the final result.

1.) Open up the image that you want to use and ensure that the image mode is set to RGB, you can do this by going into Image > Mode and then check its set to RGB.

2.) Press Q to go into quick mask mode and make sure that the quick mask option that is on the main toolbar are set to selected areas. Using the Paintbrush fill in the area that you would like to colourize, this area will then appear in red.

3.) Press Q again and this will send you back into standard mode and a selection will appear around the area you filled with the Paintbrush, when completing the next step your selections will be saved as Layer Masks which you will be able to restore later but you could also save your selections by going to Select > Save Selection and then name the selection after the area which you have just outlined in the image you are using.

4.) Click on Create New Adjustment Layer icon which is at the bottom of the layers palette and choose the option of colour balance from the menu, you will be given a option of highlights, mid-tones and shadows and adjust the sliders for these until you find the colour that you think looks the best, this choice isn’t final you will have the option of going back and editing using your layers palette by double clicking on the adjustment layer icon for the layer that you want to edit.

5.) Repeat this process over again for the other parts of the photo that you need to colourize, when this is al done and you have got colour using your colour balance adjustment layer you can also make further additional adjustment layers to adjust each colour layer more, you will be given a selection of options including Contrast, Shadows, Brightness, Saturation, Hue… Just load the particular selection by clicking CTRL and then clicking onto the adjustment layer, and repeat the process of adding a new adjustment layer.

There are several ways of making a drop shadow in Photoshop and this tutorial will show you them all, drop shadows are very simple yet they are used a lot in the design industry and if used correctly are effective.

1.) Begin by finding an object that you would like to add a drop shadow to; drop shadows can be applied to most elements so you can use a logo, text or clipart as long as the object is on its own layer. Once you have chosen your object press D on your keyboard, this will reset yours colours to their default value.

2.) If you have chosen text to apply the drop shadow to, select the type tool and then type your text, make a new layer in the Layers Palette and drag it underneath the layer that contains your text, then name this layer shadow. Hold down CTRL on the keyboard and click on the text layer and this will load a selection around it.

3.) After doing this go to Select > Feather and choose a number and then press OK. The higher the number you choose the softer and more spread out your drop shadow will appear.

4.) Check that the Shadow layer is selected and then go to Edit > Fill > Foreground Colour to then fill the feathered selection with black.

5.) Depending upon the direction your ‘light source’ is coming from you need to move the shadow layer several pixels up/down and several pixels right/left.

6.) Once you have finished this the shadow will look unrealistically dark and to change this you will need to adjust the opacity of the Shadow layer, meaning you make the shadow lighter, do this until you believe the shadow appears realistic.