Most of my photos are manipulated in one way or another using Photoshop™. I have used it for more than ten years but am still learning all the time. What I find most difficult of all is understanding the help files… they don’t seem to be written for people like me. Even the series of “for Dummies” books are not easy enough for me. My sister suggests a new range of books is needed: “Photoshop for Absolute Dorks”. (Thanks, Annie!)

Anyway, here are a few of the things I have done with one of my photos.

Walking around the city one day, I came across this doorway. Once the image had been transferred to my computer, I then

- straightened it with the skew tool

- sharpened it with unsharp mask

- adjusted the brightness, contrast and saturation

- corrected a few stains and imperfections with the stamp tool. Depending on the original photograph, this process can take just a few minutes or several hours. The trick is to zoom into the image until it is very large and use a very small stamp for the corrections.

… so it looked like this:

Then I added a very small white canvas (margin) around it and, finally, chose a suitable colour for the frame.

By the way… you would never make corrections without making a copy of your image first, would you?