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ngdawg · 12-26-2007, 07:56 PM

While I'm a huge PS user, the first step is prevention.
Be sure your ISO is conducive to the situation you're photographing, as well as your AV (or EV) and white balance. All the PS'ing in the world won't kill the noise and blur of a wrongly setup shot. Same with the aperature-make sure it's correct for what you're doing.
Make sure you're saving your shots at a minimum 300 dpi to really tighten the pixels up; most viewers default even RAW's at 72dpi. Using the crop tool in PS to 'condense' the file will increase the DPI or just set it to 300 in the crop tool settings. (Ex: cropping a 45in by 27 in file to an 8x10 increases the dpi, but only with the crop tool. Using a marquee and "Image/Crop" won't do that). Primary colors suck at lower DPI's.
Some people use "Levels", some use "Curves". "Levels" is a gamma correction and doesn't have the capability to contrast, whereas it's possible to do with "Curves".
I use a freebie plug-in called "Xero" which has a filter called "Improver". This smooths and sharpens, eliminating some of the 'noise' and blur.

My PS won't open my RAW's (Minolta MRW), so I use Irfanview for the preliminaries-correction, resizing, etc., before getting to PS.

One other thing people don't think about-your monitor. It needs to be as accurate as possible colorwise. You can either adjust the screen by holding up a magazine page to it as you adjust or print something vivid until it looks good enough.

12-26-2007, 07:56 PM	#9 (permalink)
ngdawg peekaboo Location: on the back, bitch	While I'm a huge PS user, the first step is prevention. Be sure your ISO is conducive to the situation you're photographing, as well as your AV (or EV) and white balance. All the PS'ing in the world won't kill the noise and blur of a wrongly setup shot. Same with the aperature-make sure it's correct for what you're doing. Make sure you're saving your shots at a minimum 300 dpi to really tighten the pixels up; most viewers default even RAW's at 72dpi. Using the crop tool in PS to 'condense' the file will increase the DPI or just set it to 300 in the crop tool settings. (Ex: cropping a 45in by 27 in file to an 8x10 increases the dpi, but only with the crop tool. Using a marquee and "Image/Crop" won't do that). Primary colors suck at lower DPI's. Some people use "Levels", some use "Curves". "Levels" is a gamma correction and doesn't have the capability to contrast, whereas it's possible to do with "Curves". I use a freebie plug-in called "Xero" which has a filter called "Improver". This smooths and sharpens, eliminating some of the 'noise' and blur. My PS won't open my RAW's (Minolta MRW), so I use Irfanview for the preliminaries-correction, resizing, etc., before getting to PS. One other thing people don't think about-your monitor. It needs to be as accurate as possible colorwise. You can either adjust the screen by holding up a magazine page to it as you adjust or print something vivid until it looks good enough.