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Want to learn how everything works in Photoshop? We'll help you make your photos better, draw vector graphics, and design a web site.
Learn the Basics of Photoshop in Under 25 Minutes - To get started with Photoshop, you need to know what everything does. Here's a look at practically every tool in Photoshop in less than 25 minutes.
Basics of Photoshop: Color Correction, Touch Ups, and Enhancements - Now that you know the tools Photoshop has to offer, we can take a look at using them to correct and alter color, retouch blemishes and other unwanted parts of your photos, and enhance portraits to make the subject look especially good.
Basics of Photoshop: Basic Drawing with the Pen Tool - Photoshop isn't just for photos. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at Photoshop's ability to create vector graphics with the pen tool and draw my friend Christine.
Basics of Photoshop: Designing a Website - For our last lesson, we're going to take a look at how to use Photoshop to layout and mock up a web design—the Lifehacker home page—from scratch.
Basics of Photoshop: Next Steps and Further Resources - If you get this far that means you've learned the basics of Photoshop—but now what? Before we call it quits, we'll take a look at the next steps you can take in furthering your Photoshop education and some additional resources to help you along the way.
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This is something you can generally do just by eying the photo, but the proper method is to consult the histogram. You can bring this up by going into the Window menu and choosing Histogram. The left side represents the shadows, the right side the highlights, leaving the middle for the midtones. If a particular color is dominating the photo in any area, you'll see it dominating that space on the histogram. This can be a handy guide for spotting necessary corrections.
Color Balance is not a very flexible tool, but sometimes you just need minor adjustments to color and you can use Color Balance to apply them quickly. If the brightest parts of your photo are just a little bit too red—something that's common with photos taken in low light—you can just select the Highlights radio button and then move the sliders towards cyan and blue a bit until you start to see the colors look a bit more balanced and neutral. You can also use Color Balance to create some interesting color effects by emphasizing different colors in the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Play around with it and get a feel for what it can do. It's not a tool you want to use most of the time, since Curves will generally help you do everything better and with more flexibility, but for quick changes Color Balance can definitely be useful.
Levels is like Curves (which we'll discuss next) with training wheels. You have three main sliders. On the left, you have the shadows slider. Moving it to the right will increase the intensity of the shadows. On the right, you have the highlights slider. Moving it to the left will increase the intensity of the highlights of your photo. In the middle, you have the midtones slider. Moving it to the left will brighten up your photo and moving it to the right will make it darker. These sliders mainly affect contrast. The sliders under Output Levels affect brightness. Moving the black slider towards the white one will brighten things up. Moving the white slider toward the black one will darken them. By default, Levels applies any of these changes to the entire photo, but you can select a specific color channel and alter it all by itself. There's a little drop-down menu at the top of the Levels panel that lets you select from all channels—I'm going to assume you're in the RGB colorspace and it says RGB—or each individual channel (red, green, and blue). If you want to brighten or darken just the reds, select the red channel and make your adjustments. To see a full demonstration of how Levels works, watch the video.
Curves is definitely the best color correction tool you've got in Photoshop, but you might find it a little intimidating and shy away from it since Levels seems to work well enough. Trust me—curves is much better, so take the time to get to know it and learn how it works so you're using it to do most of your adjustments. It's powerful, versatile, and very easy to control once you get the hang of it. That said, it works a lot like levels only you set your own points. You can adjust the entire image or just specific channels, just like you can in levels. To make a point on the curve, you just click anywhere on the line and drag in a particular direction. If you pull towards the top left corner, you'll brighten things up. If you pull down towards the bottom right corner, you'll darken things. The middle of the line in curves represents the midtones. The bottom of the line, touching the bottom left corner, represents the shadows. That would leave the top, which represents the highlights.
Sometimes you can just let Photoshop do a lot of the work for you. While you don't want to rely on Photoshop's Auto Tone option, you can just chose it from the Image menu to let Photoshop make an educated guess about what your photo needs in terms tone and color adjustments. Sometimes you can save yourself a little time by just using Auto Tone, but definitely don't rely on it. Sometimes it just gets it right and it takes about two seconds to try it out and see if it works. If it doesn't work, undo it, and do the corrections yourself. If it does work, you just saved yourself some time.
We've already discussed the healing brush quite a bit so we're not going to go over it in great detail here. Basically it works by selecting a source point (which you do by option-clicking an area of the photo) and painting over the area you want to "heal" with image data from the source point. The healing brush then uses its magic to blend in the painted source material with the stuff surrounding it. Generally this results in a more realistic result than you'd get with the Clone Stamp, but not always. The Clone Stamp works in the exact same fashion as the Healing Brush, but the Clone Stamp doesn't do any healing. All it does is replace the target area with whatever you selected as a source point. While you're technically cloning another part of the photo and this may seem like it's going to look redundant, when you're correcting small areas it can sometimes look better than what the Healing Brush will give you—especially when you're near hard edges and areas of contrast. Both tools are best demonstrated visually, so be sure to watch the video if you're having trouble understanding how they work.
In addition to the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp, there are a few other ways to make corrections. If you're looking to reduce redness in certain parts of the skin, often times you can accomplish this by simply desaturating the red area a little bit. The Sponge Tool can help you easily desaturate a particular area. (If you've forgotten what the Sponge Tool is, refer back to 
One of the best and easiest tricks to enhancing a portrait is making use if your color channels. You can find your color channels in the Channels palette on the right side of your screen. Assuming you're in the RGB color space, you'll see four options: RGB, red, green, and blue. RGB is the color image as you know it. The others are the respective channels. Click each of these and note their differences. You'll find that red has the most light, blue has the most detail, and green is kind of a combination of them both. When you're dealing with people, detail in skin is generally something you want to avoid and that's exactly what the red channel can help you do. Sometimes it's a near-perfect black and white photo all by itself, but if we're working with color it's still very useful. To make a nice adjustment, select the red channel, then select all (Command+A on a Mac, Control+A on a PC) and copy the image. Now switch back to the RGB combine channel, go back to your Layers palette, and paste the red channel. This will create a new layer on top of your background and you'll see only the red channel on your canvas. From the Layers palette, select a blending mode of Overlay for your red channel layer and reduce its opacity to somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. As you're making this adjustment you'll see what a nice effect it can have (or you can just see this effect by watching the video associated with this lesson). This is one of the easiest adjustments to make and it's incredibly useful. It removes unwanted detail in the skin, adds contrast right where you want it, and often improves your photo's color as well.
Burning and dodging can also be extremely useful when applying "virtual makeup" to your subject. This is something you'll want to do for men as well as women, because we're going to be very subtle and make it look as natural as possible. The idea is to place added contrast in the features of the face we want to emphasize: the eyes, nose, and mouth. You can use the burn tool to burn the midtones and shadows of the eyelashes and eyebrows, the curve of the nose, and the inner edges of the lips. You can use the dodge tool to brighten up the midtones of the colored and white parts of the eye and the inside of the lips. For a full demonstration, check out the video associated with this lesson. If you've forgotten how to use the burn and dodge tools, you'll see a proper demonstration in the video as well but you can also refer back to 
