Tip 3: Faking a small depth of field.

Those photos you see where the subject is in sharp focus and the background is blurred have a small depth of field. It's hard to get that effect with a point and shoot digital camera, but you can fake it with Photoshop (though your professional snapper will sneer!) We'll use layers and layer masks again.

1. Duplicate your background layer and name it "DOF".

2. Select the menu item Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur and apply blur to your DOF layer. A value of 3 to 6 pixels is probably about right, but it will depend on your shot.

3. Add a layer mask to the DOF layer in "Reveal all" mode - you will still see your blurred DOF layer.

4. Set foreground and background colours to their defaults by pressing "D". You'll now be painting in black, which will hide the DOF layer when you paint on its layer mask.

5. Use an appropriately sized brush to paint out the mask where you want your image to be sharp. As you get closer to the edges of your subject, reduce the brush size and zoom in to get a good hard edge between subject and background. If you make a mistake, swap the colours by pressing "X" and paint the mask on again. Don't forget to make sure you're painting the mask and not the image itself.

Tip 4: Burning & dodging with an overlay-neutral fill.

Burning and dodging means making your image darker or lighter. (If you have trouble recalling which is which, remember that burnt toast is dark.) Use this method to subtly darken or lighten areas of your image. There are burn and dodge tools in Photoshop which work directly on the image, but using a layer leaves the original untouched.

1. Create a new empty layer from the menu bar: Layer> New> Layer. In the resulting dialog change the blending mode to Overlay and the opacity to around 25%, and check the "Fill with Overlay-neutral color" checkbox. This will fill the layer with 50% grey. In Overlay mode 50% grey is transparent, so your image will look just the same. In Overlay mode greys darker than 50% make the underlying image darker; greys lighter than 50% make it lighter.

2. Set foreground and background colours to their defaults by pressing "D".

3. Select a soft-edged brush of a size appropriate to the area you're working on. By pressing "X" to select either black or white you can now paint onto the grey fill layer: black in areas you want to darken, white in areas you want to lighten.

4. Adjust the opacity of the fill layer to increase or decrease the effect. Alternately, you can start out with the fill layer's opacity at 100% and reduce the opacity of your brush. This will allow you to vary the strength of the effect in different places.

Tip 5: Equalising contrast with a contrast mask.

This technique is very cool. It makes dark areas lighter and light areas darker by automatically creating a grey Overlay fill layer based on the image itself. It's fantastic for bringing out detail in the corners of a shot where the flash didn't quite reach, or darkening those distant hazy mountains. To be honest, I run it on just about every shot I take, just to see what it does! If there are areas where it doesn't work, use a layer mask (see tips 2 and 3) to paint it out.

1. Duplicate your background layer. Set the duplicate's blending mode to "Overlay" and its Opacity to about 75%. Name the layer "Contrast Mask".

2. Desaturate the Contrast Mask layer by selecting Image> Adjustments> Desaturate, or keystroke shift-cmd(ctl)-U.

3. Invert the Contrast Mask layer by selecting Image> Adjustments> Invert, or keystroke cmd(ctl)-I.

4. Select Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur and blur the Contrast Mask layer. The amount depends on the resolution and subject matter of your shot, but anywhere between 30 - 150 pixels should work: less for shots with more detail or lower resolution. This takes a little trial and error.

5. You can vary the effect by changing the blending mode to Soft Light or Hard Light, varying the amount of blur, and increasing or decreasing the opacity of the Contrast Mask layer.

There are a few things to be aware of with this technique. Because you're using a fairly broad blur, you might find that a dark area which is smaller than your blur value and which is next to a large bright area actually becomes darker. No problem: add a layer mask to the Contrast Mask layer and paint out the areas you want untouched with a soft-edged brush. You may also see a light band where, for example, bright sky meets a dark horizon. This band is a factor of the blur amount, so adjust accordingly. Finally, you may see increased noise in areas of low contrast, like the sky.

Incidentally, you can also produce a cool, urban cross-processed effect by immediately going backwards three steps in the history palette once you've done the blur.

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