Post Processing Guide?

[Miyuki]

...As your editing skills improve you will learn what you like, and what doesn't work and slowly you will develop your own workflow and style. Early on in your photographic development, look at what others do, and if you like it ask them how they did it. There are as many ways to edit a photo as their are to take it. There is not a 'perfect' editing workflow that can be written down and given out. As for what to look for. I would say look for editing that doesn't look like it has been edited. For me subtle, natural editing is the best. I want people to look at what my photo is of..the subject..not look and go, WOW look at all that editing. Less is more!

As a guide to start out:

learn how to do levels adjustments
learn how to crop
learn how to increase/decrease contrast
learn how to convert to monochrome
learn how to clone (to remove that bit of rubbish from the beach etc)
Learn how to sharpen
learn how to selectively adjust saturation (but do not over-do it)
Learn how to vignette

These are in no particular order, but they will stand you in good stead for the basics of editing and you can achieve fairly much anything, if you can do the above, well.

So basically each person does it differently, and it is a part of the learning process.
Asking others how they did theirs is a good idea, and I guess AP is a perfect place for that

I learned some of the editing elements you mentioned over the last few weeks, but I don't know all of them yet. I will look up how to do them.

Thank you for the helpful advice Rick

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Good Q! Basically, it's to "fix" what doesn't look "right" in the image.
But bear in mind that PP already begins when going from just raw to a jpeg/tiff.
Only couple of major ones I can think of are to:
-fix cropping/framing
-adjust tones/hues
-reduce noise
-sharpening (lower in the list because if it need that much you'd have to consider another image)

There are tutorials - pointed to occasionally here, but... I'm a bit the same. Sometimes you need a nudge to see what needs fixing.
I just started with Photoshop years and versions ago and learnt along the way, trying out ideas mentioned here as well.

Am.
PS: I will say that the Help in Photoshop is quite interesting and not badly named. There is a well-known book on Photoshop, but I can't recall
the title and I wouldn't even consider it anyway, but you might find it helpful. Its name will come up here soon enough.

PS again: Right now, actually: the author is Scott Kelby.

What you mentioned was quite funny to me, because sharpening and noise reduction were the two things I learned last week! I will have a look at Scott Kelby's PP book you mentioned

Thank you Am!

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I started with CS2 , Was lost for two weeks But finally as Rick and AM have said , You learn to know what you like , Stay in the limits , Dont push the sliders to much , At first it's tempting to go overboard , Keep it natural , Still trying to get my son William as well to do a Video tute of my simple and quick processing which I'll post here on AP , No layers , Just selective processing and simple to do , each image takes maybe 5 mins , I do it day in day out ,

Stay in the limits is such a good advice
Last week, I did a bit of experimental PP exposure blending for the first time, and the edited photo looked hideous That was a good learning experience.

'Keep it natural'...I will keep this in my mind