Photograph tweeking

[kevin63]

When you guys have taken a photo what type of tweeks do you do to enhance the photo's, i sometimes us a focus enhancement tool but not sure if this is the thing to do.
I have a D50 and photoshop 7 software i take all kind of photo's and am a total novice.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[spyke]

The "classic" tweaks are:

- Unsharp mask. Raises the contrast on edges to simulate sharper focus. Be gentle with it though.

- Levels. Unless you metered the shot perfectly, often shadow detail will be invisible but not lost - use levels (carefully!) to get the detail back.

- Cropping. An obvious one really - can make a huge impact to a photo.

- Convert to B/W. Don't just convert to grayscale! You can drop into Channels mode (look near Layers) and play with the RGB components to create some dramatic black and white photos. Combine with a mask to create selective-colour shots (see my Paris Metro on the November competition thread).

[Gemm]

I'm not sure what focus enhancement tool is, but if you mean trying to bring out-of-focus images look in focus, then I'd forget about it as it would never work (unless there's a secret tool I don't know about!) I believe you have to get the focusing right in the first place, and no tool would correct it.

My normal workflow is; cropping (if necessary), level adjustment, saturation enhancement (if necessary) then sharpening. I don't think you'd need any more than that in most cases (if you get the shots right in the first place).