Curvemeister Forum

Not really a Curvemeister question, but... 

I (generally) use a Dan M type workflow.  Noise correction, Color correct, contrast boost, color boost, crop, and sharpen.  Where does retouching happen?  My thoughts have been to do them almost at the end.  I did them early once or twice and the correction was not perfect and I had to fix my fix later.  I did it early because it was difficult and I did not know if I could do it. 

One type of exception would be a correction that was a composite or two images.  The classic is pasting in one member of a group.

Retouch late?  Global corrections first, details last?

For every rule there are exceptions....

Personally, I generally retouch before I color correct.  I'm sure there are others that will go the other way but in my current workflow I start by fixing obvious problems...Lighting, contrast, retouching, then color.  The reason I go this route is that if the image requires lighting or contrast fixes I may have more re-touching to do after they are corrected.  It's my workflow...it works for me...

The color is generally not a problem unless like your example you are adding an object from another image..then color might be a bigger issue.
anyone else care to share??
Greg

I guess it depends on what needs to be retouched.  I usually retouch first, then do everything else.  I usually need to do a bit more retouching later on, depending on what pops up.

If I need to scan a photograph, and the photograph is too big to fit on my scanner, then I'll need to do several scans and stitch them together.  When I do this, I'll usually need to make adjustments to the brightness first, since the two or more sections to be stitched don't always match up.  After that, I'll do my retouching.

Oh, one tip that I'm sure most of you know.....if you do need to make two scans and stitch them together, you should place the first section of the picture to be scanned on the flatbed, then scan it.  When you do the second scan, don't just slide the picture over and scan it.  Instead, rotate the picture 180 degrees, then slide it over.  This will result in an upside down, second half of the picture to be stitched, but just use Photoshop to rotate it back 180 degrees.  The two halves will match up better.