An online album was our choice of sharing our pictures with friends all over the world. However, a picture will look differently on the print medium vs the computer monitor. Touchup is needed to optimize them for the monitor display.

The followings are the main steps in my amateur workflow using Photoshop 7. If you are interested, please refer to the list of books at the end of this section. Digital photo manipulation is such a vast and creative field that I am still learning new techniques everyday!

1. Rotation This is usually the first step when I approach a picture. No matter how careful I am with my camera and tripod, it is never exactly level perfectly — there is always a slight tilt of 1° or 2°. This is very easy to fix in Photoshop. Call up the grid by this menu sequence: View -> Show -> Grid. With the grid on the picture, rotate until it looks level relatively to the grid by using the Arbitary Rotation function: Image -> Rotate Canvas -> Arbitrary. To ensure the best image quality, there should only be one arbitrary rotation. Therefore, if you get the angle wrong, always undo it and start over again until archieving the desired result. Usually, I got there with in two or three passes.

2. Crop The next step is to get rid of unnecessary background. In the sample picture on the right, the top half of the photo distracts the viewer from focusing on the subject. Use the Crop tool to highlight only the desired area, and then press the ENTER key to get rid of the rest.

3. Enhance color Figure A. An S-curve adds punches to the color. Figure B. Drag the curve up to make the picture brighter; down to dim. Figure C. Select the color channel in which the curve applies. For a brilliant display on computer monitor, I like to add some punch to the color with the help of an "S-curve". This is also the step that can possibly fix any other lighting problems in the picture, such as underexposure, color cast, etc. Add a Curves adjustment layer to the picture: Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Curves. Drag the curve until it takes the form as in Figure A. (Note that the curve on the right here is exaggerated for illustration. Usually you only need a very flat S.) For an underexposed picture, use another curves adjustment layer to brighten it up. Again, add a Curves adjustment layer: Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Curves. This time drag the curve up a bit at the mid-point, as shown in Figure B. If the picture is overexposed, simply dray it down. One last step I usually do was to correct any color cast. In our pictures, the scanner used for scanning the film negatives gave a slight red cast for all its output. To have natural looking pictures, the extra amount of red need to be reduced. This can be done by adding another layer of curve. Switch to the Red channel as in Figure C, then drag the curve down, therefore reducing the intensity of the red color only. Enhancing color is actually very interesting. One of the books I suggested at the end of this section discusses this topic in great depth.

4. Resize image Next, I have to scale the image down to fit nicely in my album site, which has a 640-by-640 image area. This is really the easiest step. Open up the resize menu by Images -> Image Size and select the desired dimensions.

5. Sharpen Sharpening is a matter of taste. I choose these settings for the subtle yet perceptible effect. The resolution of the common computer screen is way lower than what the human eyes can do: about 15000 pixels per inch at the typical reading distance vs the best computer screen of only 120 pixels per inch. Therefore, all images will look a little blurred on a computer screen. Sharpening is a visual trick to make the images appear better on screen. First select the background layer. Bring up the Unsharp Mask by Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask. Subtle improvement is what I aim for so I would dial the settings to an Amount of 50%, Radius of 0.5 pixel and threshold of 3. It is a matter of taste really on how much to sharpen. Tinker with the settings until you find one that looks best for you. Also, it is important to point out that the optimal settings are dependent on your image size. If you have a larger image, you would need a large radius. There are many sharpening tools on market that promise to sharpen much better than what the Photoshop Unsharp Mask can do. If you are serious, you can consider using them.

6. Frame Have you noticed that pictures look much better when they are framed? This applied to images on the computer screen too. In Photoshop, very nice frames can be created by changing the Blending Options of the background layer. The steps, however, can be quite involved. Fortunately, they can be automated, much like the way macros work in Microsoft Excel and Word. Here, I have included the Photoshop Action I used for the frames in my album. Take a look at it and tinker it to your taste! › Download Peter's Photoshop actions for frames

Before and after After all the toil, this is the result. The steps above might seem involved at first. But once you have touched up a couple of your pictures, the flow will be much smoother. Before After

Two excellent books on Photoshop techniques: › Scott Kelby: The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers › Michael Kieran: Photoshop Color Correction