Posted by Greg Maklae on December 13, 2008 at 7:02 AM
I have read several books, and taken a class on using PhotoShop, and have come away more confused than enlightened. There appears to be wide disagreement, to the point of contradiction, as to what should be done when. Does anyone have a flowchart that they follow: ie, WB, then crop, then levels ... Thanks for any assistance.
Posted by Robert Fisher on December 13, 2008 at 8:22 AM
It's pretty much up to you how you want to go about it. Develop a workflow that suits your needs. If you're working with RAW images in ACR, they've set up a pretty good workflow with their tabs (or vertical menu in LR).
In general, do global adjustments first and then work your way to local adjustments with sharpening as the last step (I know some people do some intermediate sharpening steps as well). Do as much as you can with the RAW file before converting to TIFF (or JPEG) and use layers as much as possible on the TIFF file to maintain quality (JPEGs don't support layers). That's my approach, for what it's worth.
Posted by John Reed on December 13, 2008 at 9:37 AM
Greg, I know what you mean regarding confusion but after a while a rather uniform overview became clear to me and I think distilled to these steps, this "workflow" is what most people recommend. It is what I follow and works exceedingly well.
Four steps: 1) adjust tones, that is the blacks, whites and greys. There are several tools for this and that's where some confusion enters. You can adjust tones with brightness/contrast, levels, curves, shadow/hightlight tool and more. Use whatever works for you but step one is a tones adjustment. 2) adjust color. Again, mulitiple tools - levels or curves again, hue/saturation, color balance, selective color, on and on. It's important to do colors after tones because if you did color first then tones, you likely would have to go back and readjust color again. 3) size or resize - if you like the entire image, you can simply resize to whatever finished size you want, both dimensions and resolution. If you want only a portion of the image or a different proportion (ratio height to width), then use the crop tool. 4) sharpen. Until you get a little more sophisticated, the safest thing to do is sharpen as the very last thing you do because it is size and resolution dependent. The same amount of sharpening will not work for the same image at two different sizes or two different resolutions.
That's it. Four steps. One final thing. As noted in the other post, as the software has evolved, some experts now advocate a 3 step sharpening approach. Pre-sharpen, sharpen for effect, sharpen for output. The pre-sharpening can be done in RAW or PS but is done even before tonal adjustments. The sharpening for effect is done after color and the sharpen for output done after final sizing. Regardless though, 4 main steps: adj tone, adj color, size/crop, sharpen. Follow this workflow and you won't go wrong. Hope this helps. Let me know.
JR
After you create your full resolution tiff or psd file, save it without making any adjustments. This is your unedited backup file. Now, duplicate the file. This is your 'master' file. Make all of your tone and color adjustments to this 'master' file, and crop as needed. You do not resize, change resolution, or sharpen this file.
Once you have your 'master' file, you then use it to create 'targeted' output files at the size and resolution you need.
The advantage of this workflow is that you only have to make corrections/adjustments to a single file. Note: you should make a backup copy of your 'master' file in case a disaster strikes.
-P
Posted by Greg Maklae on December 13, 2008 at 11:19 AM
Thanks for the feed back. Takes a lot of confusion out of the process and hopefully future posts will show better processing.
Posted by Richard Ditch on December 14, 2008 at 4:37 PM
I've put an example of my typical work flow on my web site. It takes an image from raw to final jpeg.
Discussion
5 repliesIn general, do global adjustments first and then work your way to local adjustments with sharpening as the last step (I know some people do some intermediate sharpening steps as well). Do as much as you can with the RAW file before converting to TIFF (or JPEG) and use layers as much as possible on the TIFF file to maintain quality (JPEGs don't support layers). That's my approach, for what it's worth.
Four steps: 1) adjust tones, that is the blacks, whites and greys. There are several tools for this and that's where some confusion enters. You can adjust tones with brightness/contrast, levels, curves, shadow/hightlight tool and more. Use whatever works for you but step one is a tones adjustment. 2) adjust color. Again, mulitiple tools - levels or curves again, hue/saturation, color balance, selective color, on and on. It's important to do colors after tones because if you did color first then tones, you likely would have to go back and readjust color again. 3) size or resize - if you like the entire image, you can simply resize to whatever finished size you want, both dimensions and resolution. If you want only a portion of the image or a different proportion (ratio height to width), then use the crop tool. 4) sharpen. Until you get a little more sophisticated, the safest thing to do is sharpen as the very last thing you do because it is size and resolution dependent. The same amount of sharpening will not work for the same image at two different sizes or two different resolutions.
That's it. Four steps. One final thing. As noted in the other post, as the software has evolved, some experts now advocate a 3 step sharpening approach. Pre-sharpen, sharpen for effect, sharpen for output. The pre-sharpening can be done in RAW or PS but is done even before tonal adjustments. The sharpening for effect is done after color and the sharpen for output done after final sizing. Regardless though, 4 main steps: adj tone, adj color, size/crop, sharpen. Follow this workflow and you won't go wrong. Hope this helps. Let me know.
JR
Once you have your 'master' file, you then use it to create 'targeted' output files at the size and resolution you need.
The advantage of this workflow is that you only have to make corrections/adjustments to a single file. Note: you should make a backup copy of your 'master' file in case a disaster strikes.
-P
Raw to Jpeg Example