I took a great picture of Chloe on New Year’s Day. Our whole family was totally ker-flop, and we all spent most of the day on a big pile of pillows in the middle of the empty living room floor. I took this shot and loved it, but it was too dark to be a real keeper. In came Photoshop. As I’ve said before, I am no Photoshop expert. I dabble and make do with the few tools I know. One of these days, I’ll get Chris at Shooting the Kids to give me a real lesson (he’s a Photoshop genius), but until then, I have a few main tools I use – Levels, Curves (though I’m not very good at Curves), Dodge/Burn, Channel Mixer, and Crop.

For this shot, I used Levels. The Levels tool allows you to adjust your contrast, bring up brightness and manipulate shadow detail in your image. I opened up Levels Adjustment and played with the midtones and highlights sliders to get it just right. I wanted to go even a little brighter, but I like how her hand looks and didn’t want to have it so overexposed that it would lose detail.