1. Be Not Afraid—You Always Can Undo And Reset Everything
I’ve found that photographers consistently become very cautious with their photos when they start working with them in the computer. They’re afraid to hurt them. The good news: You can’t hurt them! As long as you don’t save over your original file, you always can go back and change your work. (A good safety tip: Work on a copy of your original file, not the original itself.) You can undo every adjustment with Cmd/Ctrl Z as long as you do this immediately after the adjustment (Command is used for the Mac Command or Apple key; Ctrl is used for Windows).

Also, every adjustment window has a Cancel button, plus a secret Reset button. While the adjustment window is open, hold down the Option/Alt (Mac/Windows) key and the Cancel button changes to Reset, which resets the adjustments. In addition, you have the History palette as a great resource, too. This is simply a record of your adjustments, and you can go back into that history to an early stage of your adjustments at any time (up to the limit of history states; 20 is the default).

Since you can’t hurt your image, you don’t have to worry about knowing every control perfectly. If you don’t know something, just try whatever you think might work and see what happens. Nothing is going to break, no Photoshop police are going to arrest you and you might even learn about some controls for future consideration. You always can find out what any control does by just trying it, then undoing it if it doesn’t work.

2. Crop and Rotate
First, crop your photo and rotate crooked horizons. This allows you to remove unneeded distractions that will affect how you adjust an image, as well as problem areas that can cause adjustment problems. In addition, this gets rid of unneeded pixels that may slow down your computer. Use the Crop tool in the Tool palette (it looks like crossed Ls) by clicking in one spot and dragging your crop selection to an approximate size. You can size exactly by moving the sides and corners of the crop box.

By moving your cursor outside of the box, it turns to a curved arrow, which allows you to rotate your crop box. Now you can create a crop that parallels a crooked horizon, for example, which means that it will be straight when you apply the crop. Apply the crop by double-clicking inside the crop box or by hitting Enter or Return. You can crop to a specific size by entering dimensions in the options bar below your menu headings.

3. Black And White Thresholds
Black areas in your photo are critical to contrast and color. Highlights make a photo lively. You need to set these early on in your image processing, and Levels is an excellent way to do this. Press Alt/Option while moving the left (black) slider in Levels, and the screen goes white (black threshold screen). As you move the slider to the right, you’ll begin to see colors and blacks show up. When they start to appear, release the Alt/Option key to see what the photo is looking like. On most photos, you’ll want a solid black somewhere, but in some photos, such as a foggy day or soft-focus flowers, this would ruin the image. Sometimes, you’ll quit when just little spots of black appear; other times, you’ll want something stronger in your shadows.

You do the same for highlights, but now use the Alt/Option key with the right or white slider to see where they are (white threshold screen).

4. Adjust Tthe Midtones
After checking blacks and whites, your photo may be too dark or light. Now you need to adjust the midtones. The best way to do this is with Curves, although the Levels midtone slider can be used to set midtones. Curves provides more control and can offer better tonal gradations. If you’re unfamiliar with Curves, try clicking on the center, angled line in the middle. Drag it up to lighten midtones and down to darken them.

5. Correct Overall Color
An easy and simple way to fix problem colors is to use Levels and the gray eyedropper. Do this as a separate step from earlier Levels adjustments, however. That way, you can undo this color-correction change without affecting anything else.

Open Levels, then click to choose the middle eyedropper (gray color). Move your cursor over the photo; you’ll see it changes to an eyedropper. Find something in the photo that should be a neutral color (gray, black, white) and click on it. If you get lucky, your photo will adjust exactly to the colors you always wanted. More likely, you’ll get colors almost right or wildly off. No problem; just click again on something else. If the photo looks too ugly, use the Reset trick in Tip 1.

In most photos, you can find something to click that will give excellent color (for more advanced users, this is a great use of an adjustment layer because you always can tweak the adjustment by turning down the opacity of the layer).

6. Adjust Color
Adjusting color is much more than simple color correction. It can range from fixing a problem color that didn’t record right (blue flowers are notorious for that, for example) to enhancing color saturation. Learn to use the Hue/Saturation control fully for many options in adjusting color. The Hue slider lets you change the color itself, which you probably won’t do much. The Saturation slider will increase your image’s color richness—use it carefully. It’s rare that an overall adjustment needs more than 10 to 15 points of change.

Some real power in this tool comes when you click the Flyout menu button to the right of the Master color choice. Now you’ll see a whole set of specific colors. Click on one, then use the Hue slider to affect it. You even can tell Photoshop to be more specific by moving your cursor onto the photo and clicking the color you want. This is a great way to correct specific colors without changing the whole photo or to even totally alter someone’s clothing color! The little color bar at the bottom of the window tells you the range of hues being affected by the tool.

7. Select And Isolate
Once you’ve done overall adjustments to your photo, take a look at small or “local” areas that need adjustment separately from the rest of the image. You need to isolate those areas so you can change them without affecting anything else. The simplest way to isolate special areas in the image is by using the selection tools. These tools (at the upper part of the toolbar) give you multiple ways of selecting specific sections of an image. The Polygonal Lasso, Magnetic Lasso and Magic Wand are good places to start, as they’re all easy to use.

The Polygonal Lasso lets you select from point to point as you
click spots on a photo (you even can do Curves by clicking spots close together). Use the Alt/Option key to back up click points.

The Magnetic Lasso and Magic Wand are semi-automated selection tools. Click once with the Magnetic Lasso, then move your cursor around a strongly contrasted edge and the tool will find the edge. Click once with the Magic Wand on solid (or near-solid) colors and tones, and the whole area is selected at once (change the Tolerance setting if too much or too little is selected).

You can add to selections by holding down the Shift key while starting a new selection point and subtract from a selection by using the Alt/Option key the same way. If you have Photoshop Elements, try out the Selection Brush.

8. Spot Removal
Spots from dust used to be a real problem in the old darkroom. Then they appeared on scanned images. Now they show up in images from dust on the sensor. Spotting the specks from a traditional print used to be a pain. Today, it’s fairly easy with Photoshop.

Two tools work well for this. The new Spot Healing Brush (which is in both Photoshop CS2 and Elements 3) lets you just touch and click your cursor on a spot and it magically disappears. The key to this tool is to size it correctly (use the Options bar below the menus to make it close to the size of the defect) and to use it multiple times if the first try isn’t right (don’t undo between clicks). A hard-edged brush works quite well with spots.

The Clone Stamp tool will help you deal with spots and other small problems in an image. The key to using it is to size it correctly as well, but you always want it to be soft-edged (for better blending). Too many photographers use this like a brush. It’s better used like a “stamp” by clicking multiple times rather than once and painting. You need to choose your clone point carefully. If you try it and it doesn’t look right, undo the clone and try a new clone point.

It also helps to continually make slight changes to your cloning point as you progress. This reduces cloning artifacts (tiny duplication of details). In addition, change the size of your brush even while doing the same section. It will facilitate better blending of the cloning.

9. Size The Photo
At some point, you’ll need to size your photo for printing to a printing resolution. The size of the photo affects sharpening, so it’s usually best to do sizing at the end of the process, just before sharpening. Image resolution is different from printing resolution. To set a printing resolution, go to the Image Size (or Resize in Elements) option under the Image menu item.

First, be sure the Resample box isn’t checked. Type in a printing resolution between 200 and 300 ppi; this will tell you how big the image can be printed using the original pixels. If it isn’t big enough at 200 ppi, check Resample and type in a larger size in the dimensions area. Use Bicubic Smoother (or just Bicubic if you have an older version of Photoshop) for enlarging photos. If the photo isn’t small enough at 300 ppi, also check Resample and type in a smaller size, then use Bicubic Sharper.

10. Sharpen
Sharpening should be done at the end of the process to minimize some adjustment problems. Noise is one element that can be adversely affected if sharpening is done too early. Unsharp Mask is a standard (the name refers to a commercial printing industry process used for sharpening). Try these settings: Amount—130 to 180 (depends on detail; Amount refers to the strength of the sharpening); Radius—1 to 1.5 (depends on image size; Radius is based on how far Photoshop looks for tonal differences to affect); and Threshold—0 to 10 (depends on noise in the photo; most digital cameras do well with 2 to 3 unless there’s a lot of noise; Threshold relates to the tonal difference where Photoshop starts making changes to edges).

Don’t oversharpen. You can tell when an image is oversharpened when it loses some of its subtle tonalities and starts to look harsh. Another sign of oversharpening is when halos appear around strong contrasts in your photo (you can see them in the preview box if you move your cursor over the photo and click on a contrasty edge; it will appear in the preview).

Photoshop CS2 has a new sharpening tool, Smart Sharpen, which works to sharpen while minimizing halos. Its limitation is that it doesn’t have a Threshold setting, so noise can be adversely affected. Sharpener Pro 2.0 from nik Multimedia is an excellent plug-in for sharpening that’s quite intuitive. It allows you to base sharpness on your medium and how you plan to use the photo. In addition, you can help it smartly deal with sharpening in different areas based on colors in the photo (which can be a big help with noise).PC

Rob Sheppard, editor of Outdoor Photographer and PCPhoto, is the author of The Epson Complete Guide to Digital Printing, The PCPhoto Digital SLR Handbook and The PCPhoto Digital Zoom Handbook.