DIGITAL PHOTO EDITING WORKFLOW

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-photo-editing-workflow.htm

OVERVIEW: TOP 10 POST-PROCESSING STEPS

Each is listed roughly in the order that they should be applied:

1. White Balance - temperature and tint adjustment sliders
2. Exposure - exposure compensation, highlight/shadow recovery
3. Noise Reduction - during RAW development or using external software
4. Lens Corrections - distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberrations
5. Detail - capture sharpening and local contrast enhancement
6. Contrast - black point, levels and curves tools
7. Framing - straighten and crop
8. Refinements - color adjustments and selective enhancements
9. Resizing - enlarge for a print or downsize for the web or email
10. Output Sharpening - customized for your subject matter and print/screen size

The above steps are virtually universal, so most photo editing software should work. If you've captured your images using the RAW file format (highly recommended), then the order of the above steps isn't as important, since they'll be intelligently applied when you develop using your RAW software. Otherwise it's critical that you follow the above sequence — especially with steps involving sharpening, resizing and noise reduction. Be careful though, extreme edits can easily cause image posterization with JPEG files.