Photoshop Post Processing order?

[ameerat42]

...I have been wading through some of these posts and confess to being overwhelmed a bit ...

Hmm! Not whelmed at all, then. OK, problem solved. Well, as a bit of a guide only...

I am slowly getting more proficient at PS and would like to know if there is a 'recommended workflow' for PS, you know, the best order to do things like contrast, sharpening, colour correction, etc, etc...

Ans 1: That sounds like good progress. I will say "recommended workflow" for specific things you want to do. Break the processing of an image - I said "an image" to differentiate from "batch" jobs - down into steps, and you have indicated this already. Somewhere early you would want to consider whether the image will need some straightening/cropping/re-sizing/other distortions. Color and tone adjustments would come next and you'd have to decide which to do first, AND whether you do these on the image itself or whether you introduce adjustment layers. The UNDO feature would particularly help here. Finally, attend to the sharpening, but especially if the image has been re-sized.

...I recently have taken to shooting in RAW and making the first lot of corrections in RAW, then opening in PS and making other corrections. I realise this may be a bit like 'how long is a piece of string question', but what is the best order to do these corrections?...

Ans 2: In your RAW conversion, do as much as the program will allow you to do. Mine cannot crop or re-size, for instance, so that's for Photoshop. Have a pretty good idea what you will need to do in Photoshop as you're doing your raw conversion. If you think you've got a major tonal problem - deep shadows, or really bright highlights - then consider whether you need to export the image as a 16-bit tiff to work on in Photoshop. That way you will NOT do a lot of tone and color compression that Photoshop will then - at best - struggle with. Or, from your raw converter, perhaps you may have a couple of versions of the file to blend later, say, one for highlights and one for shadows.

But generally, do as much basic processing of the image as you can in the raw converter.

...At the moment, sharpening is usually one of the last things I do, as well as adding the watermark, but I am not confident that I am doing other corrections in the right order, or in fact, the right way LOL

Are there any resources, either here or on the net, you can point me to? I would prefer step by step instructions over videos on the likes YouTube and such.

Ans 3: Not really any I could tell you about. Some of the ones I have seen are pretty specific, and they're the more useful ones, like how to use layers for sharpening etc. None such on "ideal workflows", as I
don't think there are any.

Ans 4: Good luck and keep at it!