The easiest way to avoid underexposed photos is to adjust your aperture settings, your shutter speed and your film speed when shooting. That's sounds pretty easy, right? Forget it. Photoshop was invented for the "I-can't-find-time-to-read-the-manual" photographer. Who cares if it's too dark or too light, we've got Photoshop!

So how easy is it to fix an underexposed photo? Very easy. Open your photo up and choose Image> Adjustments> Shadow/Highlight (CS-only. For pre-CS look below). You'll see an immediate change in your photo and it will probably be too extreme, but don't panic. Photoshop ships with defaults that are often way over the top. Just play with the Amount Slider and the Tonal Width Slider until you find just the right balance. And you're done!

Selecting fly-away hair can be one of the toughest assignments in Photoshop. The Extract command can be helpful. Third-party plug-ins, such as Mask Pro ( www.extensis.com) and KnockOut (www.corel.com), are great. But sometimes the easiest way to select those random strands of hair is right in your Channels palette.

Open the image in Photoshop. Open the Channels palette. Click on each channel, one at a time, to find the channel with the greatest contrast between the strands of hair and the background behind them. (Ignore the rest of the image, you're only interested in the area around the individual strands of hair.) In our sample image (PhotoSpin.com, #0770118), the Blue channel offers the best contrast.

The basis of this tutorial is not showing how to make the coolest interface, but to show how to use the copy/duplicate commands you need to whip things out quick rather then having 20 duplicate layers and always having your objects paste off alignment, I'll show how to fix that. We will be using Gradients, as it enables us to do this a lot faster. You can see, making a control pad does take a little time and there are a lot more steps to do, I've tried to make it as short as possible.

Adobe Photoshop is the world's premier digital graphics editing application. Unlike any other design tool, it is probably the only one that has an almost endless learning curve and there are few, if any, graphic designers that can truly say that they know all there is to know about it.

For beginners, Adobe Photoshop can sometimes seem like a frustratingly complex program and many are tempted to give up, or pay for expensive class-based training programs. But there are other options.

This is one of the most frequent questions we get in the Photoshop Forums and Photoshop 911. Here's a fairly simple solution that will work in almost all versions of Photoshop after version 4, and in all versions of Photoshop Elements.

The first step is making sure our photos are compatible. We'll do this by opening both images, and selecting
Image > Image Size
In this dialog, make sure the resolutions are the same, and make a mental note of which file has larger dimensions. You'll want to drag the smaller image into the larger one.