This image was slightly underexposed and shot with an incorrect white-balance setting. We're going to fix it up.

Digital cameras are smarter and more capable than film cameras, but underneath, they still work the same: light hits an image sensor, and the camera’s interpretation of that light is the image you see. Sometimes the camera (or the photographer) gets it wrong, and the picture suffers. But once you’ve mastered a few tools found in Adobe Creative Suite 3, you can make adjustments to exposure and contrast. You can also do it nondestructively, making things easier to fix in the future if you change your mind.

This workflow depends on Adobe Bridge CS3, which comes with Photoshop, and Adobe Camera Raw 4.2, which you can use even if you didn’t shoot your image in RAW format. You can optionally use Photoshop CS3 later to tweak parts of the image.

WHAT YOU NEED

> Adobe Photoshop CS3 ($649 à la carte, or as part of one of the Creative Suite 3 bundles)

> A photo in JPEG format (download the image we used here)

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1 - Set Up Adobe Bridge. Open Adobe Bridge and select Bridge CS3 > Preferences. Under the Behavior tab, check the “When a camera is connected, launch Adobe Photo Downloader” checkbox. Also check “Double-click edits Camera Raw settings in Bridge” if you prefer to automatically launch the Camera Raw plug-in when you double-click any RAW file in Bridge. If you don’t want Adobe Photo Downloader to launch automatically, you can still get it to launch from within Bridge. Select File > Get Photos From Camera to bring up the dialog. You can change the import settings to help you organize your photos, perhaps with more human-readable folder names. The “Convert to DNG” checkbox won’t do anything to JPEG files.

Using Bridge means that newly imported photos won’t be added to your iPhoto library. And if you already have a lot of photos in iPhoto ’08, you’ll need to make them available to Bridge in order to use them. To do so, find your iPhoto library (which is usually in your /Pictures folder), right-click it, and select Show Package Contents. Then make an alias of the Originals folder and put the alias somewhere outside the package. (Don’t make an alias of the Modified folder unless you want to open files that were modified by iPhoto.)

Bridge can see into folders, but it can’t see into the iPhoto library, since that’s a package. Luckily, it can follow an alias into the library.

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