One of the great things you can do with Photoshop is that you can take a picture that is dark and has a blue cast and turn it into something more visually pleasing. Unfortunately, there is some controversy surrounding how far you should go and exactly how one should go about it.
When manipulating images, you are essentially changing it from what it was when the photographer shot the picture. Some people get bent out of shape if you do any more than restore the digitized image to how it originally looked prior to scanning. The other camp says that the real artwork begins in Photoshop. The truth is somewhere in between. It all depends on what you want to do. If you're a photography major and want to show how good you are with a camera, then you probably shouldn't do too much to change things, otherwise I think the sky is the limit. You have so much potential to improve the look and feel of a picture why not let things get changed around just a bit. Sure, it might not be an actual representation of the facts, but most of the time that's not what we are going for.
The other controversy is how one should go about adjusting an image. I have read numerous books and magazine articles on how to "properly" adjust images and the only thing they had in common was that they had nothing in common. There are many ways to get the job done, I am only going to show the way I approach things. My goal when adjusting images is to get the picture to look good with the least amount of time and hassle. I admit that there are some methods which allow finer tuning of the image and produce a better looking picture, but most of the time that extra 30% of effort results in a 5% improvement in the picture.
Anyway, the only reason why I am droning on like this is because someday you will run across another way to correct images and I don't want you to think that this is the only way or even the best way. I use it because it is quick, makes sense and is easy to go back and correct your mistakes.
