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We take a lot of pictures with our son, and he has really great skin color. The problem is, when my wife and I are in pictures with him, we always come out looking sunburned while he looks great. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix in Photoshop that just gets quicker with a little practice.

You can use this technique in all sorts of ways, but one of the most useful I’ve found is for correcting the skin tone of a portrait subject. For example, you can count on someone getting themselves actually sunburned while everyone else looks fine at least once in your photography days. Here’s how to fix it.

Step 1 - Create a Color Balance adjustment layer. After opening the file in Photoshop, go down to the layers palette and click the icon that’s a half black, half white circle. This pops up a menu for adjustment layers. Choose “Color Balance…”.

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If you’ve been taking photographs for any length of time, you’ve surely come across the technique of turning color digital photographs into black and white photographs. Doing this to some photos can really add a level of drama and impact that would not be there if the photo was in color.

But sometimes you have a photo that you don’t like in color. But you don’t like it in black and white either. It’s a no-man’s-land photo, and you need a way to save it. Desaturating the color without completely blowing it away may be a good option.

I’ll show you how to make this simple change to your photo in Photoshop. Any photo editing software should do just fine though if you don’t have Photoshop. Here’s how to do it:

Digital imaging enables Average Joe to do some truly amazing photo retouching. Software such as Adobe Photoshop allows you to easily zap zits, whiten teeth, wipe out wrinkles, remove fat, ditch scars, and well, just about anything. The ability to misrepresent yourself and others in photos is a real possibility. This has arguably led to some social problems in today’s society. Surely you’ve heard this before: teenagers everywhere (especially girls) feel increasingly self conscious given the flurry of perfect images thrown at them every day.

This issue was highlighted on July 16th when Jezebel wrote an article on how Redbook magazine retouched the hell out of Faith Hill’s photo. They even paid $10,000 for the original picture, and show it to you next to the retouched version.

Here’s a short film from Dove. With the help of makeup artists, hairdressers, and a Photoshop guru, the star of the video makes the transition from attractive but average woman to billboard diva. It’s an interesting little flick and I recommend you take the 70 seconds to watch (if for no other reason than seeing cool photo magic).

So this begs the question: should you use software to improve photos?