Fortumately, Jasc PaintShop Pro has some good tools for doing precise color corrections . We are using an image by Laura Jefferies, Claire, downloaded from www.domai.com . Domai is a site where one can find tasteful nudes done by Laura and others for a modest fee.

Here is a photo that could be moved in either direction on the luminosity spectrum - darker, dramatic lighting or brighter high key rendition. We chose high key to emphasize the torso form and to fade out the background. However, we do not pursue a full high key rendition in which only the figure stays natural and the rest of the background fades to full or slightly off-white. In fact we tried this intially by masking the figure , off-whiting the background and bringing up the overall body tone.

The result was surprisingly flat and uninteresting. So that is the reason to depart from the normal high key portrait or picture finishing style. But the basic steps and techniques we use in this exercise applies just as well to a full high key rendition.

Our first task is to brighten and flatten the colors for the whole picture. Using the Colors | Adjust | Curves dialog we simply bring up the overall tone by 1/2 stop - using a mid curve setting does the trick quickly. The next step is a little trickier - we want to flatten all the tones towrds the middle range of brightness. each program also has a histogram levels of input and out tool to do the same task.

Clicking on PaintShop Pro's Colors | Histogram Functions | Histogram Adjustment brings up the dialog shown to the left. Our adjustment works on over Lumninosity though we could edit each of the RGB channels separately.

Our first adjust expands the midtones slightly to compensate for a higher gamma setting (brighter) set by dragging the gray median arrow to the right. Then by pulling the low arrow to the right for a 10 reading and the white output range slider down for a 230 reading, the overall brightness is flattened and lowered slightly to a more natural, if bright skin tone. Again, don't be shy about trying many settings because the results are easily undone.

In Corel PhotoPaint, we create a second layer or object by clicking on Object | Duplicate. This creates a copy of the original image and makes this layer the focus of all edits leaving the original background layer unchanged. If all goes well we will blend these two layers together.

Clicking on the Effects | Contours | Find Edges tool brings up the dialog shown at the left. This tool finds the edge areas in the image and outlines them in gray with some hints of color. Its like an instant high key pencil sketch. To clean up this sketch we

and rate of change. Use the middle white bar to change the transition point of the transparency . This is PhotoPiant's powerful tool for controling the transparency and interaction of two layers.

The final step is a lot of little touch ups the most obvious being adding a light yellow green brushing to the upper right hand side of the screen. In addition, a dark, dramatic lighting rendition of the same figure was done. The figures below show the High Key and Dramatic Lighting final renditions - you be the judge on which works better.