@ Marlene: Hope you didn't try too hard to find the "smoother shadow", because there is none. What I meant was, that "smoothing the shadow" instead of taking it out completely (like I did here) would also be a good idea (guess that's what Kort meant by "blurring the shadow"). And yes, I removed the shadow by cloning - but as I use "PSP" and have no idea about "PS", I'm not quite sure, whether I can be of any help... I just cloned parts of the surrounding skin onto the shadow using different percentages of the "covering mode" to get the right "toning". As I said - hard to explain (especially as my PSP is in German so I don't even know the right translations for those technical terms there). Maybe it would be easier to give you some advice, if I knew your image?!? Drea