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This is because most consumer cameras use a very basic lens and pretty much anything more than a metre away will be in pin-sharp focus. This is great for landscapes, but the payoff is decidedly flat and lifeless-looking portraits. Over the next three pages we'll show how a little time spent with Photoshop's layers and filters can give your pictures far more depth and a real studio finish.

We've chosen Photoshop 7 because its Extract filter makes it much easier to separate an image into several different parts, but you could always achieve the same thing using the marquee tool in any image editor to copy and paste the relevant parts manually. See our tips in the text below for advice on how to achieve this.

The techniques outlined in this tutorial can be applied to almost any image you choose, and once you've harnessed the power of Photoshop, shots taken with a digital camera will never lack a professional feel.

The above technique is highly effective when applied to photographs of people, but will work with pretty much any subject matter you like.

The most important thing is to set aside plenty of time for making your initial extractions, and to ensure an untouched version of your original image is sitting at the bottom of the layer stack.

As we said above, though, while we've used Photoshop, it's possible to achieve the same result using far less sophisticated software - for example, the program that was bundled with your digital camera - and following many of the steps in reverse. That's precisely what we're going to do here.

Before you do anything,

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make a copy of your original image and put it somewhere safe. This means that if anything goes wrong, no permanent harm will have been done. With that out of the way, make four further copies, giving three of them the names we used in step 1 above (Furthest, Middle and Closest) and call the fourth Base Level. Darken this final image by 20%.

Starting with the image called Furthest, use the eraser tool to remove all but the background of the scene so the only parts left showing are what we isolated in step 4, above. In our example, it's the wall and window.

Next, select the entire image, apply a fairly strong blur and darken it by 20%. Use the magic wand tool to select the erased area, then invert the selection and copy the filled, blurred part of the image into the base-level file. The join should be seamless, apart from the blur, and the lighting should be uniform across the whole canvas.

Save your progress and turn to the Middle image. This time, skip the eraser and use the marquee or magic wand tool to select the middle ground of the picture. Again, in line with the workthrough above, this would be the chairs and most of the right-hand wall of our example photo. Be careful when going round the edge of any people, as hair and fluffy jumpers are notoriously difficult to isolate cleanly. Once you're done, apply lighting effects and a blur to the selection at around a half to two thirds of the strength you used on the furthest image, then copy the selection and paste it into the base level.

Many cheap photo editors don't understand layers, so apply your effects to the Furthest and Middle sections before pasting them onto the base level image. Applying effects afterwards will further blur and darken the base level and your picture will look less like a holiday snap and more like a dungeon.

Finally, isolate the main subject of the photo in the Closest image. As with the Middle section it's best to use the marquee and magic wand tools. There's no need to apply any kind of blur or lighting adjustment unless you have some particular reason for doing so. When you're happy with the results, copy and paste them onto the base level.