As my wife and I go to various art shows, galleries, contests and photo club exhibits, and as we judge various photo contests, we notice two common Photoshop errors repeatedly. If someone looks at your traditional print and says, "Oh, that's digital!", it is usually not a compliment. It usually denotes manipulation and phoniness. There is probably nothing wrong with the original image. More than likely it is just over-saturated and over-sharpened in Photoshop.

Let me clarify what I'm going to say by adding that I'm not talking about "Photoshop Artistry" here - - That is a different discipline altogether - - I'm talking about a photographer that wants to take their images and make stunning "traditional" prints using Photoshop as their "Photographic Enlarger".

In my opinion, these are the two most abused functions in digital printing and digital imaging. What does this mean? It means that the colors are unrealistic and unnatural to the point of creating posterization and pixelization, and that lines and objects are so sharp that you are getting a slight "halo" effect.

So, as you are working with your digital image in Photoshop, what do you do to avoid this?

Let's start with Saturation. Saturation is defined as the intensity or purity of a color. The trick is to keep your colors looking natural and not too intense. Trying to increase the amount of a color that is just not there will create a sense of phoniness. Use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to make your corrections.

Now let's talk about Sharpness. Again, the trick is to keep things looking natural and not too intense. In Photoshop, open "Unsharp Mask' and try starting with Amount: 75, Radius: 1.0 and Threshold: 2. Increase the "Amount" slider slightly until you start to see too sharp edges, then back off a bit. By the way, if your image is not fairly sharp to begin with, you cannot use the sharpening features in Photoshop to sharpen it.

In the next newsletter, we'll start with the basics of Color Management in Photoshop.  Stay tuned!