Photoshop Picture Processing Procedure?

B
Posted By
BrianP
Jul 7, 2003
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294
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1
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Closed
Hi,

What is the best sequence in which to perform the various photo correction functions in Photoshop?

I used to do the sharpening first so as to be working with the most pristine data. I recently read in "Professional Photoshop" that sharpening should be done last.

Here’s what I normally do on a set of event pictures:

* Levels. Just RGB only unless the colors are way off.
* Saturation. My D100 seems to produce slightly undersaturated pictures. Sat + 10 to 20.
* Unsharpen mask. Zoom in to 2X and increase AMOUNT until not quite crispy.
o I leave the RADIUS at 1.0 and THRESHOLD to 0. They don’t seem to do much???
* Color balance (optional, usually to ~compensate for incorrect white balance).
* Brightness
* Contrast

If I am working with NEF files, I do the White Balance, EV compensation and sharpening on the RAW data.

Is this the best order in which to do these functions?

If you need to do any retouching, is it best to do it before, during or after the color/density corrections?

Thank you,

BrianP

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S
saswss
Jul 16, 2003
In article ,
"Brian P. Barnes" writes:
I used to do the sharpening first so as to be working with the most pristine data. I recently read in "Professional Photoshop" that sharpening should be done last.

The amount of sharpening that is needed depends on the size of the final image and it’s medium, i.e., web page, photo-quality print, newspaper-quality print, etc. So it is usually a good idea to postpone sharpening until near the end, especially if the image is to be used in several different media. But you won’t get thrown in jail for doing a little sharpening at an early stage. Bear in mind that sharpening produces artifacts that may be exaggerated by subsequent changes in color or tonal range.

The most common situation where I do some early sharpening is for images that don’t have quite as much depth of field as I would have liked. I select the areas that are a little blurry and do a little luminosity sharpening.

If you do early sharpening, you may want to do it by creating a new layer with a duplicate of the image, running the high- pass filter on the new layer, and changing the blending mode to overlay or one of the something-light modes. This allows you to change the amount of sharpening later on by changing the blending mode or opacity of the high-pass layer.

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Warren S. Sarle SAS Institute Inc. The opinions expressed here SAS Campus Drive are mine and not necessarily
(919) 677-8000 Cary, NC 27513, USA those of SAS Institute.

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