Advice on Workflow please.

[Good Guy]

What is the recommended workflow in PSPP X2?
Are there any golden rules e.g. 'Do this first/last', 'Do this before/after
that', etc?
Is the workflow different for different subjects, e.g. landscape, portrait, sport, macro,etc?
Perhaps there is a tutorial in the internet.
Any help for a new user will be appreciated.
The more specific, the better.

[allicorn]

A couple good basic tips I think:

Always save work-in-progress images as PSPIMAGE - this keeps all the layers, styles and grid/guide settings ready to for you pick the file up and continue working with it later without having lost any detail or settings.

A convenient way to save test versions (probably JPEGs) of your image while you're still working on it is to use the File->Save Copy As option. PSP remembers the last folder and last filetype seperately for the "Save As" and "Save Copy As" features, so this can help avoid having to fiddle around with the file requesters every time you want to save.

The File->Revert feature can act as a kind of quick and easy "Super Undo". When you select it, everything you've done to the image since the last time you saved it is thrown away and you get right back to that point.

The Image->Image Information (SHIFT+I by default, I think) dialog has some useful little notepad boxes on the "Creator Information" tab. Whatever you type in those fields is saved with the image (so long as you're saving it as a PSPIMAGE file). If you have any text in the image and you might want to alter it later, why not keep a note here of exactly what font, size and other font settings you used? You can keep notes on all kinds of settings here.

Working with a set of images that'll all feature a few recurring colors (eg maybe you're working on company stationary designs, website buttons etc)? For each color you'll want to use over and over again, you can create a "Swatch" so that PSP'll remember it for you. On the Materials palette, there's a little tab at the top which looks like a colorful checkerboard. Click that then click the little Add Swatch button at the bottom, give your color a name. These swatches are stored permanently, so they'll even be there for you if you close PSP and come back to work on the same set of images at some later point.

Holding down SPACE while any type of normal tool is selected will temporarily switch you to the Pan tool allowing you to grab the image with the left mousebutton and scroll around by dragging. Letting go of space puts you right back to the tool you had selected. Handy when you're in the middle of drawing with a tool on a large or heavily zoomed image.

I'm sure there's lots more useful basic tips folks can come up with!

Alli

[willgoss]

Information from the past.....
-----------------------------------------------------
PSP Photo Correction Workflow
By Kris Zaklika's

A. General tasks

1. Color balance
Automatic Color Balance
Manual Color Correction
Fade correction
Channel Mixer
Color Balance
Adjust Red/Green/Blue
Hue/Saturation/Luminance

2. Contrast
Automatic Contrast Enhancement
Histogram Adjustment
Brightness/Contrast
Highlight/Midtone/Shadow
Levels
Gamma Correction
Curves

3. Saturation
Automatic Saturation Enhancement
Hue/Saturation/Luminance


B. Specific tasks

1. Problems due to image source
Video images - Deinterlace filter
Scanned images from print - Moiré Pattern Removal
JPEG images - JPEG Artifact Removal

2. Noise and film grain
Digital Camera Noise Removal
Edge Preserving Smoothing filter
Texture Preserving Smoothing filter
Average filter
Soften and Soften More
Blur and Blur More
Gaussian Blur

3. Color Aberrations
Chromatic Aberration Removal Filter

4. Scratches
Manual Scratch Remover
Automatic Small Scratch Removal

5. Specks and dots
Salt and Pepper filter
Median filter
Despeckle

6. Red-eye
Red-eye Removal

7. Adding impact
Clarify
High Pass Sharpen
Sharpen and Sharpen More
Edge Enhance and Edge Enhance More
Unsharp masking


As noted before, the filters should generally be applied in the order of the main categories listed above.
There are two exceptions:

1. If the image is exceptionally dark or light everywhere, the color information is not very accurate. In this case it is best to adjust contrast before adjusting color.

2. If you are going to be using very high settings of the Clarify picture, it can reduce the saturation of the image. In this case, it is better to run Clarify after contrast adjustment and then follow up with saturation adjustment.


These last two sections are, again, directly quoted from Kris' postings on the topic.