Bluff it as a fashion photographer

6. Tweak the image
The best alternative to Aperture is Adobe Lightroom. It's available for PC and Mac, and best of all it's a free download (for the moment). Although the software is still technically in beta, it's completely stable on our G5 Mac, and we've been using it for a lot of our photography over the last few months.

The Lightroom interface is similar to the one in Aperture. We prefer Adobe's implementation of the loupé tool, and Aperture's ability to organise photos. Since Lightroom is currently free, we're going to use it to pick our final photo and tweak it into a trendy minimalist feast for the front cover of Fashion magazine.

There's a huge number of changes you can make to photographs in Lightroom. In the top photo here we're checking the model's dress to make sure that the detail is sharp and there is no colour distortion. You can see that Lightroom offers a range of effect presets down the left-hand side of the screen.

These presets let you give the image a bunch of different looks for different situations -- you can add your own to this list. The built-in presets provide most of the common techniques used in a traditional darkroom. One of our favourites is 'Direct Positive', which gives photographs an extremely vivid, surreal colour reminiscent of the hot summer days in Coca-Cola adverts.

The built-in greyscale conversion is also a very good way of transforming colour photographs into black and white. You'll often get better results from using this method than the conventional greyscale conversion in Photoshop.

You can switch between presets, or create your own look using the sliders in the second photo here. These control elements such as colour temperature (used to correct for different lighting environments) and exposure.

The easiest way to get to grips with what you can do here is to play about with the sliders. We want a strong, punchy look to our photo with the highlights slightly blown out to emphasise the geometry of our model.

To achieve this, we're going to up the exposure, increase the blacks (crush black tones of a specific latitude into a single dense black) and reduce vibrance and saturation slightly to give the image a colder tone.

You can achieve some impressive effects here, and in some cases correct a photograph that has been badly exposed. Ideally you want to start with a properly exposed photograph that looks as neutral as possible in-camera, and then use Lightroom to add special effects.

There are lots of other controls to tweak here. If you scroll down the right-hand panel you'll find that you can alter how sharp the image appears -- another invaluable tool. Be careful how sharp you make the picture. You'll find that for printing on the average photoprinter it helps to slightly oversharpen the image, but for the Web you'll want to ease off a little or you'll see pixellation and other nasties.