Manipulating images to produce better quality in Photoshop

[Cynthia Daniel]

Here I tried Image | Adjustments | Autocolor. My take is the skin tones look better, but there's too much contrast. So, I'm going to Edit | Undo Autocolor.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Since I wasn't satisfied with my results with Autocolor, I'll try a different approach: Image | Adjustments | Color Balance. With the slider bar, I take out some magenta (adding green) and take out some blue (adding yellow). Here is how my image looks now.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Now I'm going to adjust the brightness contrast: Image | Adjustments | Brightness/Contrast

[Cynthia Daniel]

Now I sharpen my image: Filter | Sharpen | Sharpen
Not bad, but perhaps a bit oversharpened.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Now I click Edit | Undo Sharpen Edges because I want to try Filter | Sharpen | Sharpen Edges. I think this is better.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Next step is Edit | Undo Sharpen Edges because I want to try Filter | Sharpen | Unsharp Mask. After playing with it some, here is the result. I think the last one and this one are the best. The differences are very subtle and to see them, you might need to save these images and view them side by side.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Now you can do your final save. I didn't have a reference to adjust this to, so I simply adjusted according to what looks good to my eye. Only Sharon would know how close I came, but it's certainly better than the raw image.

By the way, I am a relative newbie in Photoshop. I use Paint Shop Pro all the time and love it, it's less expensive and easier to use. But Photoshop is the industry standard for printing. If a Photoshop expert wants to correct me on my approach, feel free to send an email.

Here's the full view of the final image.