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Do you ever wonder how professional photographers create stunning images that you can only dream of capturing with your digital camera? We see their work every day in magazines, books and on billboards. Chances are, these photographers are using digital cameras much like yours, but are processing their photographs with the leading photo editing software, Photoshop CS2. Some pros may have years of experience using image-editing software, but you'd be surprised how much you can improve the quality of your own photographs by performing a few simple editing techniques with Photoshop CS2.

The First Step
The first prerequisite in creating beautiful photos is to take a good picture. You don't need an expensive digital camera; most models will do a great job. Take the time to read your camera owner's manual or a book on digital photography and look for tips and ideas. Once you've taken good shots with your digital camera, its time to get them into CS2 to complete your works of art.

The software provides you with all the tools you will need to enhance the images you've downloaded to your computer. For most of my photos, I first use Photoshop to make some basic colour corrections. I'll adjust brightness, contrast and colour saturation. Think of adjusting the screen on a new television when you first bring it home. You want the picture to look bright with the right amount of colour and contrast. For photographs, you can use automatic adjustments in Photoshop CS2 to make these overall corrections.

Transform Your Subject
Photoshop CS2 provides you with more editing tools than you can imagine. If I'm working on a photo with a power line in the middle of my deep blue sky, I can easily use the new Spot Healing Brush tool to remove it. I'll often use the Dodge tool in portraits to lighten teeth and brighten smiles. I'll use a variety of blur tools to soften skin, remove wrinkles and make my clients look years younger. I've had my portrait customers tell me that I'm much cheaper and less painful than having plastic surgery or having their teeth whitened by a dentist!

Powerful Pro Features
 Photoshop CS2 is invaluable to photographers because it offers beginning-to-end solutions for organizing, adjusting, editing and printing your photos. CS2 includes Adobe Bridge, a photo viewer and organizer that is easy to use but includes many powerful file-organizing features. Advanced and professional photographers demand control of colour throughout their workflow. Photoshop delivers with its incorporation of colour management settings (the ability to control colour as it appears on your monitor and match that colour during the printing process) throughout the program. You can even preview how a photo will look on the particular type of photo paper that is loaded into your printer! Additionally, Photoshop CS2 offers the most comprehensive raw image conversion software available; allowing photographers with advanced digital cameras to shoot in “raw” mode, then process those raw images and convert them directly into Photoshop CS2.

What separates it from other software is its timesaving automation tools. For example, I like to shoot panoramas. CS2 makes it easy to “stitch” images together using the Photomerge feature. If I need to create a slide show for a client or to show off recent holiday photos, I use the PDF Presentation feature. Adobe Bridge gives me the ability to apply raw settings made to one image to many images at once, batch rename, or rotate any number of images all at once. You can even easily create a photo Web site using the Photoshop CS2 Web Gallery! All of these automation tools come standard with Adobe Photoshop CS2.

Everything You Need
As a photographer who dates back to the old darkroom days of photography, I can say that Photoshop CS2 gives me everything I need to process my photos and create better prints than I could produce in my old darkroom or get from a professional photo lab. There are many features available to you. I'd recommend using them as much as possible, but before diving in first take some time to learn about them. To start using Photoshop CS2, you'll only need to become familiar with a few correction and editing tools. Keep it simple at first, and then learn to use other features as you need them.

Just as you depend on Windows or Mac OS for your computer, think of Photoshop CS2 as the operating system for your digital photography.

About The Author: Kevin Moss is a photographer and author of Photoshop CS2 and Digital Photography for Dummies and 50 Fast Digital Camera Techniques, 2nd Edition.