Do you ever wonder why photos in magazines look absolutely stunning, but your Facebook and MySpace photos look like crap? There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just a professional photographer that makes a difference. Your profiles and scrapbook albums can have great photos too. I mean, yes, having a top-quality camera helps tremendously, but those pictures you see of your favorite celebrities or food in their respective printing have all been treated with varying levels of Photoshop makeup to make them look as good as they do. Believe me when I say not even a photographer appointed by the gods themselves can take a snapshot that will cover up someone’s crow’s feet.

The key with Photoshop photo editing is to know when to stop – if you make a model’s head look too shiny or their cleavage a little too exaggerated, someone’s going to notice and the photo will probably end up on Photoshop Disasters. And once you get your ‘shopped photo there, it pretty much puts a big metaphorical mark on your face that says you’re a horrible editor. Subtlety is a cornerstone of photo retouching, be it for a magazine layout or if you just want your MySpace pics to look really snazzy.

Here are some ways photos get retouched:

• The Burn tool is used to darken shadows a little bit in order to accentuate the person’s features. On the same note, the Dodge tool is used to brighten highlights (like whitening teeth).

• The Hue/Saturation tool can be used to brighten or dim entire photos or certain areas of color. If a lady was wearing bright-red lipstick at the time the photo was taken, and the picture produced a subdued shade of red, saturating the lips can make them bright again.

• The Healing Brush tool is very important, as it can be used to digitally iron out wrinkles, blemishes, pixels that decided to rebel and become strange colors, and so forth. Since celebrities always tend to look dazzling, this feature is more used for photographers who take student pictures. This is why that huge zit you had on your nose on picture day didn’t show up in the photo.

• The Blur tool can be used to touch up rough spots created by the Healing Brush or that were already there. On the other hand, the Sharpen tool can be used to make certain areas more defined. If the model is wearing a sequined dress, a sweep with the Sharpen tool set to a low intensity can really bring out those details without creating that “white noise” effect that indicates too much sharpening.

• Red eye can be a problem, but a way to fix this is to use the lasso tool around the pupils, copy them, and paste them onto a new layer. From there, desaturate that new layer and use some of the various layer settings (such as Darken) in order to eliminate the freaky, demonic effect…unless you hate the person and feel the evil eyes are appropriate.

• The Liquify tool is incredibly helpful, but it must be used with exceptional refinement because it blurs the crap out of the pixels it touches. This tool can be used to do such things as give eyebrows a nicer arch, make eyes and lips bigger, reduce the size of a nose, lift the chin, expand breast sizes, shrink waists…basically anything. But these changes have to be made a little at a time, especially if it’s some significant digital plastic surgery going on.

As said, knowing how much editing is enough is just as essential as knowing how to use the previously mentioned software features. The key is that you don’t want the image to look like it has been edited – you want the picture to look good, but still natural.