Post Processing Tips and Tricks for Beginners

First Things First

Here is my preferred order of post processing and photo touchup process using the software of your choice. These are just a guideline that hit the high points as the settings are numerous and unlimited when it comes to post processing photographs. This guideline is based on a photograph of still life. When you start getting into the 'artistic' side of photography, rules are made to be broken!

1. Adjust white balance. Very important to get this correct BEFORE making any other changes to the photo. Cameras see shades of gray, so the white balance can be thrown off by colors in the image or various lighting conditions.
2. Adjust Camera Profile if needed. I usually select camera standard, camera landscape, or the camera vivid profile.
3. Adjust exposure.
4. Adjust clarity to add punch - zoom to 100% to apply with precision.
5. Adjust vibrance.
6. Adjust saturation.
7. Do all the cropping in Adobe Camera Raw if I'm using a program that uses it.
8. I recommend to use noise reduction in Camera Raw and not Adobe Elements, if required.
9. Always apply sharpening at the very end. I usually add a touch of sharpening when my RAW files are exported to my final JPG file. 

Remember, these initial settings are global and will be applied to the entire photo. If you need to apply any of these with precision within certain elements of a photo, you will need to use a software with masking capabilities. Masking will allow you to leave portions of a photo unedited and apply just the manipulation you want in specific areas of the photo as you delineate.

Optimizing images for the Web

If you are posting your photographs online, you will need to optimize them for the web. You will have to select the proper format, resolution, and quality settings. Web images need to be efficient for quick loading but also of a high enough quality that they still look good on a screen. It’s a balancing act to keep the file size small while at the same time maintaining a decent quality that is visually appealing. There are no hard and fast settings to create the best web image; the process requires judgment and a good eye.

File Formats and Onscreen Quality

Every file format has varying compression options. JPG and GIF are the most commonly used formats. The JPG format preserves the broad color range and subtle brightness variations of continuous-tone images such as photographs. JPGs can represent images using millions of colors. The GIF format performs well at compressing solid-color images and images with areas of a lot of repetitive color throughout. More along the lines of logos, vector art and illustrations with type. It uses 256 colors to represent the image and supports background transparency.