I usually tell myself to shoot my best shot as much as possible rather than do massive editing later on. But there are situations where you just can't get a good shot with the limited resources you are working with- bad light, indoors, guerilla/on-the-go, etc.

I've learned to love photoshop, my mac of course, and the wonders of that combination- the colors on a mac screen are gazillions better than on a PC. For this instructional purpose though, I used the iPhoto features since to make editing quicker and take less memory giving me similar results to photoshop.

From the original photo, I wanted to de-emphasize the guy holding the chopstick. In order to focus on the laksa noodle, I faded and then boosted the color and adjusted the levels resulting in Step 2. For the final image, I cropped the noisy areas and now have a focused shot solely for the noodles. All these were achieved in only 10 clicks- 4 to fade, 4 to boost, 1 to change levels and 1 to crop!!

If you were wondering what my settings are, here you go...