Recommended editing order and workflow?

[PLShutterbug]

If this has been covered before, please help me with a link. I looked but didn't find anything in this forum.

I've had Photo for about a year now and prior to that years of other photo editors. As a hobbyist photographer I don't use these tools every day and frequently find myself asking if I'm being the most efficient. My question: is there a suggested order to follow when editing a photo? Will performing some actions earlier make following actions faster, or dramatically slower, or affect those following actions in some adverse way? Things I tend to need to do:

• sharpening
• color correction
• levels, contrast, brightness correction
• cropping
• CR and fringing corrections
• local changes such as dodging and burning
• preparing for printing

Another question is, which tool to use for some of these actions when tools are duplicated in different personas? The Develop persona has global controls for some of the above actions but so does the Photo persona. The Photo persona seems to offer more control with individual tools and in some cases the names for similar tools are different in Develop vs. Photo (i.e.: in Photo the unsharp mask uses pixels for the Radius slider but in Develop's Detail Refinement area it is percent). What do y'all tend to do in the Develop vs. Photo personas?

I realize this will probably start a war between the "sharpen first" vs. "color correct first" factions, but I'll appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks.

[firstdefence]

• Well you could crop first, so you're not working on the area to be cropped, seems a waste of time and resources otherwise
• Secondly there is no point in colour correcting nor sharpening CR and fringing so get rid of the CR and fringing prior to most everything else
• Then colour correction
• Levels, brightness and contrast
• Sharpening; if needed
• ...and then a bit of dodge and burn prior to printing.

Sound good?

[toltec]

12 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

• Well you could crop first, so you're not working on the area to be cropped, seems a waste of time and resources otherwise
• Secondly there is no point in colour correcting nor sharpening CR and fringing so get rid of the CR and fringing prior to most everything else
• Then colour correction
• Levels, brightness and contrast
• Sharpening; if needed
• ...and then a bit of dodge and burn prior to printing.

Sound good?

Almost.

I was taught to always do sharpening last.

Unsharp mask effectively put a fringe around the edges and the amount (radius) is important.

If you then go resizing the image, defringing the image or dodging and burning, you affect the unsharp mask edge, reducing or increasing it, Not to mention "artefacts are us"!

 

[firstdefence]

1 minute ago, toltec said:

Almost.

I was taught to always do sharpening last.

Unsharp mask effectively put a fringe around the edges and the amount (radius) is important.

If you then go resizing the image, defringing the image or dodging and burning, you affect the unsharp mask edge, reducing on increasing it, Not to mention "artefacts are us"!

 

I think you're right toltec, that makes sense, in general I rarely do any dodging and burning so sharpening is where my editing normally stops.

[PLShutterbug]

Thanks for the responses. Seems what I figured. 

Cropping: goes a bit to whether the edits are to create an “I will never change it again, including aspect ratio” final image or if I want the option to print as 4:3 or 16:9 or whatever at some point in the future. But I realize that is just my preference, and I can live with some operations taking a bit longer because I’m leaving wiggle room for later.

The comment about artifacts (you and I will have to remain friends despite our language differences) is exactly what I was looking for. What are the editing steps that, if done earlier, adversely affect what I might do later? It appears that sharpening is the primary issue in this regard.

[John Rostron]

Unless I have missed it, no-one has mentioned Noise. This will not be a problem for most new images, but where it is there (say after scanning, or with a high ISO image) then Noise Reduction should came first. 

John