use a tripod

I shoot all of my photos using the raw format as opposed to jpg.  I believe that it ends up giving you better prints in the end.

When you open up a raw file in Photoshop’s Raw Convertor you will get these default settings.  The first thing that I do is I check the blue hyperlink at the very bottom middle of the screen.  I make sure that it is set on ProPhoto RGB and 16 bit.  These two things are tutorials unto themselves, so I will not go into them now.

The first thing that I do is to set the white balance.  I will usually try default first, and then depending on where the photo was taken, I might try some of the other settings in the drop-down menu.  This is really to taste.  You can also use the two sliders underneath to finetune, but I very rarely use these.  There is also a white balance tool.  It is the third button at the top left.  It is an eyedropper with gray in it.  If you have a neutral gray color in your photo you can use this tool to click on that color and it will adjust your white balance properly.  The most important thing is to get it to look how you want it.  As you can see below, I have used the Daylight preset from the drop-down menu.

The next thing I do is set the exposure.  I normally hold the alt key down and move the slider until I have just a small bit of overexposure.  It is overexposed if it is anything other than black.  I then go down to the recovery slider, hold down the alt key, and slide it to the right until everything is black again.

If you have some shadow areas that I want to lighten up some, I will use the fill slider.  If Iuse this slider, I use it just a little.  I then go down to the black slider.  I like some solid black in my photos, so I will hold down the alt key and move the slider to the right until I see some other colors pop out other than black.  You can see above that the defaultor the black slideis set to 5, and I usually add a litle more to that.

I leave the brightness and contrast sliders alone.

The next slider I use is the clarity slider.  This really adds some pop to your photo.  I will normally move the slider right until I like the effect.  I do the same with the vibrance slider, and I don’t touch the saturation slider.

After all of this, I go back to the recovery slider, hold down the alt key, and check for any blown highlights.  Move the slider to the right until the whole picture is black.

Right over the white balance sliders, you will see some tabs.  Click on the third one over.  This takes you to the sharpening window.  Below you will see the default settings.

The very first thing that you want to do is to zoom into 100%.  There is a drop-down box the lower left-hand corner where you can accomplish this.

Take the sharpening slider and begin sliding it to the right until the image looks sharp.  I usually go a little bit more because the step that we will do next puts the sharpening only where we want it.

I then go down to the masking slider, hold down the alt key, and slide it to the right.  All of the white area is being sharpened.  The black area is being masked out.  It is designed to find the edges and only sharpen those.

After this I am finished with the Raw Convertor, and I hit the button open image.  It will now open your photo in Photoshop.

The very first thing that I do with every image is to do some midtone contrast using the unsharp mask.  Go up to the filter menu > sharpen > unsharp mask.  Type  in these figures: amount – 20, radius – 50, threshold – 0.  Click ok.  This is a subtle effect, but I think it makes a difference for the better.

Below, the top photo is without the unsharp mask.  The bottom photo is with it.  You will find this effect is more pronounced on some photos and less on others.