What is your editing workflow? Is mine correct?

[psp user]

I have a simple question: Does anyone have a standard workflow for editing photos? Here is what I do: first process raw; then crop; then white balance; then image revision (e.g. removal and/or addition of pixels to recompose); then brightness; then hue and saturation; then sharpening; then filters.
Am I doing the sequence of events correctly? Please advise.

[brucet]

I don't think there is a 'right' way or a 'wrong' way.

Here's what I do.
Convert Raw. (Here you need to 'fix' any white balance issues while you have all the raw data). Save as a 16bit tiff to retain as much data as possible.
Crop. If you don't crop early on then the data in future cropped areas will/may influence any global adjustments.
Adjust any global Noise issues.
I then take a hard look at Levels.
I then look at any areas that need adjustments. Avoiding global adjustments where local adjustments, selections, will work better.

Then it's 'simply' a matter of making any necessary changes to get your final 'look'.

But keep in mind that no two images are the same. Every image needs it's own adjustments. That's why I avoid presets, scripts, actions etc. Each image will/may need it's own unique workflow. Sometimes returning to adjustments already done to redo. That's where Adjustment Layers come to into their element.

Don't get stuck with one workflow.

regards

[psp user]

Thank you. That really helps...., and your explanation makes a lot of sense.
Regards!

[Joelle]

Here is a very long explanation. This was saved from Nightingail's website many years ago (the owner is sadly no longer with us).
Kris Zaklika worked for Jasc and later Corel. He was head of the development team and responsible for many of the clever tools.



Kris Zaklika's
Workflow for Photo Correction

Many thanks to Kris for giving me permission to post the following information.




Photo correction tasks break down into two types - those that are applicable to all images, and those that address specific types of defects found only in some images - and the tools in Paint Shop Pro can be categorized in the same way. Adjustments should generally be made in the order of the main categories listed below. (Note: Listed under each step in the workflow are the PSP tools that are associated with each step. Which tools you choose to use will depend on the individual image and your own personal taste - Nightingail).


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.


"A few other pieces of advice:

1. If you don’t have a monitor whose brightness, contrast and gamma are set properly you can get unsatisfactory results. The program works just fine but the display does not show you the results correctly.

2. Before applying the automatic correction filters be sure to crop your image to remove any black or white surround or any frame. Otherwise the automatic filters can become slightly confused because they treat the border as part of the real image information.

3. When using the Salt And Pepper filter, it is best to select the areas of the image with this type of defect and operate on the selection only rather than operating on the whole image. This avoids damage to small speck-like objects such as buttons or eyes, as well as making the filter faster. The same can be true of the Automatic Small Scratch Removal filter, which can treat scratch-like image features as scratches.

4. In general, though it is possible, you will not get the best results if you run Automatic Color Balance, Automatic Contrast Enhancement and Automatic Saturation Enhancement filters on a selection rather than the whole image. This is because these filters are designed to take all the image information into account before making their decisions.

5. Fade Correction is designed as a quick, one-step filter. You may well get better results by first correcting color and then correcting contrast in two separate steps.

6. The Clarify filter brings out detail in the image without sharpening. Sharpening, which mainly influences edges in the image, can be used as a complement to Clarify since these filters do different things. The Unsharp Mask filter offers the most control over the sharpening process.


Rationale:

While the order is not mandatory in any sense, in most cases it it is optimal. This is particularly true if you are not a good judge of defects in images. I thought I would post some amplification to explain the steps a bit more.

Unlike corrections in other software, the PSP photo enhancement filters are designed to to be used to adjust one thing at a time as far as possible - color, contrast, saturation and so on. However, modifying the red, green and blue (RGB) values making up an image tends to change several things at once. Picking the correct order of steps allows you to successively isolate different aspects of the image to adjust. The order is based on the principles upon which human vision works.

The first adjustment is Automatic Color Balance. In order to balance color you must change R, G and B channel values relative to each other. This has an inevitable impact on contrast, since we see contrast as a particular combination of R, G and B. Because saturation measures how different a color is from grey of the same lightness, saturation is altered too, simply because balancing color changes what is considered to be grey. For this reason, color should be adjusted before contrast and saturation. Often, the result of color balancing makes the image look flat because contrast and/or saturation change during color balancing, particularly for large color corrections. This is not a problem because subsequent steps will remedy this.

There is an exception to color balancing first. This applies when your image is either extremely light or extremely dark - both situations where there can be no strongly saturated colors. As a result, the color information in the image is unreliable and contrast should be adjusted first to compensate for this.

The second adjustment is Automatic Contrast Enhancement. It will affect the contrast in the image, which is that component of an image that corresponds to the equivalent black and white photo. It is the main way we see detail. However, because the maximum possible saturation of a color depends on how light or dark it is, the saturation can also be changed in this step when the lightness is altered. This is the reason for applying contrast enhancement before saturation adjustment.

The third adjustment is Clarify. While Automatic Contrast Enhancement adjusts the overall contrast of the image, Clarify is a unique filter that modifies local image contrast. The effect is to make detail stand out in a natural way, without artifacts associated with sharpening edges. Since this filter also modifies the lightness or darkness of the image, it can have an effect on saturation too (typically causing a decrease). Consequently, it should be applied before saturation adjustment.

The fourth adjustment is Automatic Saturation Enhancement. This filter accurately matches the human perception of saturation. It leaves the color balance and the contrast completely unaffected. As a result, it should be applied after color and contrast have been successfully adjusted.

The fifth adjustment is sharpening the image. Using Unsharp Mask provides the most control but Sharpen or Sharpen More are alternatives. These filters all sharpen the contrast at edges in an image, which are distinct transitions in color or lightness. Because of this, sharpening makes little sense until color (balance, saturation) and lightness (global and local contrast) have been properly adjusted. In Unsharp Mask the Radius setting defines which regions of the image will be considered to be edges. Large values cause more of the image to be "edge". Strength determines the amount of sharpening. Clipping allows "weak" edges to be ignored. The larger the setting the more the effect is restricted to strong edges. This allows you to avoid sharpening image noise or JPEG artifacts. Prior to applying sharpening, it is worth testing Edge Preserving Smooth at a low setting (1 or 2). This can eliminate minor noise or film grain, preventing it becoming more visible later when the image is sharpened.

An understanding of all this stuff is not really necessary for doing image correction if you just follow the steps. However, appreciating why you see what you see can make you a more effective and efficient user of the tools.

Happy photo enhancement." - Kris Zaklika


Nightingail's Workshop

-

Hope this is useful (you might need a holiday after reading it all!)

Joëlle

[hartpaul]

Not mentioned there also is that resizing should be done before sharpening.

[psp user]

Joelle, thank you...and please thank Kris: That workflow really helps because it addresses everything in the correct sequence.
Hartpaul, I agree with your timing in this workflow for resizing (although I find I rarely need to do it for my purposes).

Regards

[Joelle]

That's great.

Kris Zaklika was an excellent teacher.
I still have many of his tutorials.

Joëlle

[brucet]

Interesting. Although did I miss cropping? That's a first step to avoid any affects of global adjustments. Also features such as Adjustment Layers also need to be taken into account.

Like all 'advice'. It needs to be viewed as a guide and not as hard and fast rules. Using your eyes to determine what needs adjust is critical. But following the correct sequence, as above, certainly makes it easier.

I'm curious about colour corrections before noise reduction. Noise reduction can introduce or delete some coloured artifacts.

But over all an interesting perspective. It would be interesting to see a rewrite given the 'new' features now in PSP. Thanks for the post.

regards

[Joelle]

His last version of PSP was PSP9 (not X9).

Corel closed down the offices where the team worked, a short time before Christmas, and fired everyone.
Not surprisingly he didn't wish to upgrade.
He remained active in the newsgroups for many years and taught us a lot.

Joëlle

[photodrawken]

Like all 'advice'. It needs to be viewed as a guide and not as hard and fast rules. Using your eyes to determine what needs adjust is critical.

I think that is the most important thing to remember.

There is no such thing as a "correct" sequence. (For example, Chromatic Aberration correction is the first thing I do. In fact, when I use RawTherapee to process my RAW images, it's automatic CA correction is done even before the RAW data is demosaiced.)

No matter in which sequence you make adjustments, you will always have to go back and refine earlier adjustments to account for changes introduced by later adjustments....

Having said that, in general, you want to first get rid of any false colours, halos, and artifacts before making any other adjustments so that you're not emphasizing the bad stuff.

[JoeB]

Interesting. Although did I miss cropping? That's a first step to avoid any affects of global adjustments.

You only missed it partly. In the other points to consider Kris did say to crop dark or white frames for the reason that they would affect global adjustments. But it's true that you should actually crop to the area you plan to use because it's not just "frames" that will affect global adjustments.

Kris was a very good teacher in the groups and his suggestions and advice certainly were invaluable to me when I first started using Jasc's PSP - v.4 I think it was.

[Ron P.]

There is one other school of thought on cropping. That is only crop when you are going to output your image, and to the size that you'll need. That way you retain as much data/information as possible for that crop. I've done both, crop during and then not until I'm ready to produce a final image for printing or sharing. I keep all my RAW files, however will discard derivative jpeg files once they've been uploaded or printed. I can always go back to the RAW files and produce another derivative. In PSP, I'll save a PSPimage file to go back to for any changes or for exporting.