25 Skills Every Man Should Know: Your Ultimate DIY Guide

These days, you can outsource almost any job -- but some things you need to know how to do yourself. Study our master list with step-by-step tips from the experts, and test your DIY aptitude each step of the way.



5. Retouch Digital Photos

Some shots are too flawed to fix with a click on autocorrect. Here's how to perform surgery on digital images with nearly any photo-editing software.

Color Temperature: If the color adjustment can't fix unnatural colors, such as a sickly green from fluorescent lights, and there's no time to tweak the red, green and blue levels, there's a last resort: Declare yourself an artist and switch the image's mode to black and white.

Cropping: Even a small spot of deep black or bright color can throw off a program's ability to balance an image's light or color levels. Crop out unwanted elements before making image-wide adjustments.

Lighting: Too much flash? Reduce the brightness and increase the contrast. For poorly lit images, do the opposite, boosting the brightness and reducing the contrast. To avoid gray, hazy images, make sure the photo's black elements are still black and the whites still white.

Red-Eye: If your software doesn't have a red-eye reduction feature, zoom in on the offending eyes until you can see individual pixels. Select the desaturation tool and dab at the red portion of each eye. This drains the color, turning reds into grays, while retaining highlights so the irises don't look artificial. The results probably won't be pretty, but boring gray beats demonic red.