A common thread on the Web asks for people to share their digital darkroom process. I'll give visitors to this site a quick walk-thru.

The image below is typical. Exposure is pretty good. White balance needs help. But this is a RAW image, so adjusting the white balance does not degrade the image. Contrast is a little flat. Goosing the saturation would add some more "pop" to the image. The water is not exactly level. Etc.

For an image like this, I try to do a lot of the global corrections in Adobe Camera Raw II. As I looked at this image, I knew it had a lot of potential. I had less than five minutes of light when I noticed the boat house on the backwater at DeSoto Park, GA. So I ran through thorns and stood in boggy muck up to my ankles as my tripod slow sank to get this shot.

I made a wholesale change in the White Balance. I took the temperature to 8100K and set the tint to +25. I boosted Exposure by 1/3 stop, set Shadows to 8, pushed Contrast to +50 and Saturation to +40.

All of my work in Photoshop was done on adjustment layers. I kept the image in 16-bits per channel thoughout.

My first global adjustment was to cool the image a bit. I used a Color Balance layer. +5 to the Midtones and +10 to Shadows for Blue. Some might prefer even more coolness. In my opinion, the image benefits from warmer tones. It is a sunset image just before dark in an autumn woods. The earth tones benefit from the warmer white balance setting.

It is not uncommon for me to tweak a global setting or two when I get the image into Photoshop.

Next came a Hue/Saturation adjustment layers. I boosted saturation +20 for the Reds, +10 for the Yellows, and +20 for the Greens.

To boost contrast a bit and add a touch of sharpening, I used my TLR Sharpening Toolkit to add some Local Contrast Enhancement. (You can read about Local Contrast Enhancement on a Tip for this site.) This is just a quick round with the Unsharp Mask filter using 20, 50, 0 as the settings for Amount, Radius, and Threshold.

The final step was a round of output sharpening with my TLR Sharpening Toolkit. This was a round of USM applied to the entire layer. No edge masks. Nothing localized. The settings were 300, 0.7, 0.

Images with more challenging problems require more steps. The steps here are typical for a photo with solid exposure that can benefit from a few tweaks and minor adjustments in Photoshop.

Cheers!