[blackstone]

Anyone any thoughts on an order of things a novice could do when you have a new image in front of you in PS 7 e.g

1. Rotate if unlevel
2. Crop etc
3. Resize if req'd
4. Adjust hue/saturation
5. Adjust brightness/contrast
6. Clone tool if req'd
7. Unsharp mask

Apologies if this has been asked many times before but a quick seach revealed nothing.

[noah]

personaly i'd resize it last. it tends to make the cloning easier and results better.

[dod]

yep, resize and sharpen last, in that order. Other than that I tend to look at the levels first and then it can be anything

This is what I tend to do.

* Do as much work as possible in RSE. White balance, exposure etc etc.
* Then convert to 16 bit TIFF, open in photoshop.
* Minor edits, such as crop, rotate etc.
* Resave TIFF.
* Adjust Hue and Saturation, either Master, or selectively changing certian colour channels as required.
* Adjust Levels
* Unsharp Mask, at a very low setting, 20, 30, 1 I think (No more than once).
* Resave TIFF

If required, I will make any adjustments before the above sharpening, things like cloning etc (in depth photoshop work)...

[Arkady]

For my work images I do as little as possible:
Do as much in RAW as possible - white balance, rough exposure correction etc.
Then open in Photoshop, adjust levels to suit output requirements (print always needs to bright and punchy).
I used to resize, but with the new D2x, I don't bother.
Apply sharpening as required in the Lightness channel only (about 150% with a radius between 1.0-1.5 pi and a threshold of about 2, though it obviously depends on the image).
Save as TIFF.
Full-frame crop to 12" along the long side at 175 dpi and save as a JPEG at about level 9 (or for a transmission time of about 60 seconds on a 56k modem connection) - this is the minimum quality acceptable to UK news-print media. The Picture Editor at the agencies will always crop your images to suit publication as will the Picture Editors at the newspapers, so I always give them the full-frame image, even if it's a bit 'loose'.
For magazine repro it has to be a 50-meg filesize, something more easily achieved with the D2x.

For personal work, I still get into the habit of saving a 'transmission' JPEG, just as it saves time if friends or family want to see a slideshow - nothing worse that waiting for 40meg TIFFS to load in Windows Picture Viewer (lol).