Hi Wendy
To begin correcting that image is actually quite simple. I did a very quick beggining for you using the following techniques. I did not do any retouching I just corrected the tonal range and started to correct the color. The whole operation of what I did took less than 2 minutes to do and you can easily duplicate it. Here is what I did.
A) I picked two points in the image. A dark and a light point. I chose the highlight at the upper left of the ashtray on the coffee table and placed a ref point. I placed another ref point on the shadow area just to the left edge and below the table.
B) I applied a curves correction using only the eye dropper tools in the curves function. The eye dropper tool to the far right was used to click on the image at the selected highlight ref point with a RGB setting of 250,250,250. You can set this value by double clicking the highlight eye dropper tool. I used the shadow eye dropper to set a RGB value of 7,7,7 by clicking at the shadow ref point. Set this value the smae as above by double clicking the shadow eyedropper tool.
C) I converted the Image to the Lab colorspace and applied a Shadow/Highlight correction with a low setting to even out the luminance. This correction was applied only to the L channal.
D I applied another curve correction to the L channal by standing up the curve at the dark end to add a bit of contrast and then applied a move to the b channel pushing the center point of the curve upward to correct for the slight reddish cast.
E) I converted the Image back to sRGB and saved it.
As stated I did not do any retouching or masking and the correction took less then 2 minutes to do. From here you can do anything you wish to make further corrections.
Here are the results of what I did.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v460/jerry717/begincorrection.jpg
Hope this helps. If you have further questions or are confused by what to do, PM me and I'll help as much as I can.
Jerry
