I don't know about you, but I didn't look all too good this morning, really not at my best. Not that there was anything wrong with me, but... well, you all know how it is, I'm sure. Sometimes you get up, get ready to go out, and whatever you try to smarten up just doesn't work. It happens to the best of us. No, really, it does - and when you see pictures of people always looking perfect, they'll have had some help, at least some of the time. Make-up can make a big difference, of course, but photographers and publishers are increasingly using technology to make the imperfect perfect.

It can be a surprisingly straightforward process, with a little practice. To start with, you're going to need Adobe Photoshop. That probably won't have come as much of a surprise: after all, aren't we all familiar with 'Photoshopping' used as a verb, denoting digitally improved pictures? Yet the software might not seem all that straightforward at a glance - menus and submenus and windows crammed to the gills with a huge range of tools and options. On the one hand, of course, this makes for a very powerful and versatile application, one that gives you complete control over your images. On the other hand, however, when you're looking to make simple improvements and you've little or no experience with the program, it might all seem rather overwhelming and complicated.

Fear not. If you know what to look for and how to use it, then giving photographs a bit of help can be both easy and quick. It's all about getting your hands on the right tools, on the tools that do the job you with the least effort and expertise.

Healing

The healing tool is one of the most effective ways to get rid of blemishes in a picture. There are two versions of the tool, one simply called healing, the other spot healing. The latter is the simplest to use - you simply click on the imperfection, and it copies details from a similar point nearby to make it look smooth and flawless (so if, for instance, you want to remove an unsightly pimple, spot healing will copy a piece of smooth skin to cover it with). The former works in just the same way, but allows you to select any part of the picture to copy from, by holding down the alt button and clicking. This can be very useful if the best looking part of the image is in a different area to the blemish.

Cropping and straightening

This is even simpler - yet overlooked surprisingly often. There really is no excuse for a lopsided picture: take some time, every time you're working with an image, to use Photoshop's image rotation tool and straighten the picture up. It's just as easy to cut out unnecessary parts of the picture or to bring one side in to balance it out and put the subject in the best location: simply drag out a rectangle using the marquee tool, and then select crop to cut it down to size.

Improving the light

Maybe the subject of the photo looks fantastic - but the picture itself doesn't. Getting the lighting of a photograph just right isn't easy, particularly if you're shooting outdoors in natural light. Fortunately, Photoshop has a number of tools with which to address these issues. The most straightforward is Auto Contrast - which does just what it says - but you can also use the Brightness and Contrast sliders to tweak those elements to be just how you need. However, there are many different aspects to the lighting of a picture, many different factors that go into the appearance; by using the sliders in the Shadows/Highlights box, you can adjust how dark or bright the shadowy parts of the picture are, and how dark or bright the lighter sections appear - as well as controlling what counts as a shadow or a highlight.

Colours

Just as the lighting of a picture won't always look perfect, so the colours can also be less than ideal. Often, they'll look too washed out: the Vibrance and Saturation sliders allow you to make all the colours brighter across the board (saturation) or to improve just those that are flagging a bit (vibrance). Alternatively, if you feel the colours in the image could benefit from being toned down a bit, just push the same sliders to the left instead of the right. Then again, you may feel that the colours themselves are wrong - in which case, the Replace Colour tool allows you to alter an entire colour (such as changing a red shirt to blue) whilst keeping the same tones and contrast so that it still looks natural. Similarly, the Selective Colour tool allows you to fine tune the composition of colours, so you can add a bit of blue to your reds, or reduce the amount of yellow in the orange shades.

Turning a flawed and unappealing photograph into one that's perfect and striking really is that easy. Of course, the plethora of other tools Photoshop provides have equally useful roles to play - and a short training course can help you to take full control of all that the software offers - but with just those few techniques, flawless images are always close at hand. After all, don't we all want to look our best - even if it takes a little help to get there?