Now, I know we've all heard a million times that the best way to get great pictures of your work is to shoot in natural light. But let's face it: that's not always possible. Many of us have day jobs, and can't start our crafty work until after the sun goes down.

So what do you do to get great color in your pictures if you have to shoot in artificial light? This is a suuuuuuuuuper simplified tutorial on how to tweak the colors in your photos in Photoshop or Picasa to take out some of the yellow that comes from shooting under a regular household lightbulb.

Before you even start: check the white balance on your camera. If you can adjust it for indoor shooting, do. It will make a world of difference.

To start: I took this picture one night of a necklace I made. I like the image, but it is just a bit too yellow.

First thing I tried was using the "Auto Color" feature in Photoshop. Sometimes Auto Color is a lifesaver, and with one click your photos look perfect. This time, not so much. This photo lost a lot of its contrast, and turned kind of greenish.

Instead, to pull back the yellows but keep the deep contrast of the original shot, I used Photoshop to adjust the Levels of the image.

Often times I will play with the Levels of an image to adjust its brightness or contrast, as I feel it gives me more control than some of the other adjustment tools. I do that by leaving the Channel on its default: RGB, and sliding the three triangular sliders back and forth until I'm happy with how the image looks. (Real technical, right?) But with this image I was already happy with the contrast, I just wanted to tweak color.

So, on opening the levels task box, I change the Channel to Blue. (Blue tends to be the opposite of Yellow on screen.)

I slid the midtone (middle) slider to the left to increase the blues in the mid tones of my photo, until I was happy with the way it looked. Often, just adding a little bit of blue like this is all you need to do to get rid of that pesky yellow. On this picture, I adjusted the reds a little bit as well, by changing the Channel to Red and moving the same slider just a tiny bit to the right to remove a little red.

If you have Photoshop, I encourage you to go in and play with the levels box and get to know it. You'll get a feel for it and your photos will thank you for it!

Picasa is also great for editing your photos, and has the added benefits of being (a) Free and (b) less complex than Photoshop. Photoshop is an amazing tool, but most people don't need everything it has to offer. In my life as a graphic designer I use Photoshop every day, and I'd say I'm proficient at it, but I'll be the first to admit that I don't know how to do at least half of what it can do.

In Picasa, same as in Photoshop, it's always best to first try to let the program do the work for you. Picasa has its own Auto Color funtion, and on this photo I think it did a really great job.

If, however, you want more control in Picasa, you can play with the "Color Temperature" slider in the "Tuning" tab. I don't think this gives quite the same level of control as the Levels in Photoshop, but it does work well at cooling down an image that is too warm, or vice versa.

The best thing you can do for your photos is to get familiar with the programs you have... go play! Experiment! There have been so many times that I've taken a photo that I thought was pretty great and then tweeked it in Photoshop and suddenly realized that the original I was so pround of... really wasn't so great to begin with. The more you know about the programs at your disposal, the more you'll know what to do with those mediocre shots to make them fabulous.