If you are an avid amateur or professional photographer, as much time can be spent in front of the computer as in the studio. With a few quick steps to perform for every photo, the time you spend staring at the screen can be reduced to allow more time doing what you love--the actual photography.
Follow these steps and shortcuts to adjusting your images. Start out choosing your color scheme. If you are converting to black and white, do this first. In Photoshop, select Image>Mode>Grayscale. Do the same step to switch to CMYK or another color mode. Next, adjust your levels (Apple L for Mac users or select Image>Adjust>Levels). In Levels, a general rule is to bring the highlights and the lowlights more toward the center of the scale to achieve the desired contrast. Once this step is complete, resize your photo and adjust the dpi to at least 300. Here, you can save yourself a step by cropping the photo to a certain size. If you plan to print out 8 x 10s, type the size into your crop tool and crop directly to that size. As your final step before saving, select Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. A good rule of thumb for this filter is to stay between 50 and 150 for the desired sharpness. Now, all that is left is to save the file. Select the file type that best fits your use (tiff for newspaper or magazine printing or gif for Web work, for example) and be sure to select the appropriate image quality for your use.
Now, there is no reason to even have to perform all of these steps to each photo in your digital library. Photoshop allows you to set up scripts to perform all of these functions for you. For information on script setups, read the Photoshop scripts for pros and amateurs a later this week for a step-by-step tutorial on the process.
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