Bob,

I mostly use Corel's PhotoPaint X3 to PP my stuff, but also use Photoshop CS2 for some stuff. I will soon upgrade to Corel X5. My process is sort of wacky (maybe everyone's is?), see below.

- Open JPEG in Corel PhotoPaint

- Correct tilt/rotation issues. Crop as needed.

- Use Corel's Auto Adjust function to see what it comes up with. I Undo this about 40% of the time as its algorithm isn't perfect. Note that it produces about the same effect as CS2's Auto Levels.

- Manually adjust image's color saturation, warm/cold tint, shadow/midtone/highlights, brightness, and contrast. If I Auto Adjusted, I still end up tweaking what it did.

- Do clean up to include removing any sensor dust speck problems, lens flare, etc. Since CS2's Magic Wand is great for this, I sometimes save it as (the file name)_Edit1.jpg with virtually no compression (to keep the quality) and reopen it in CS2 and correct these, then save.

- I reopen in Corel and do resizing for web and final sharpening (I don't like CS2's sharpening), then export it with about 8-10% compression, which often produces an 800 x (whatever) file of about 150kb.

- I open it to see if the resulting JPG is of acceptable quality. Sometimes the minor compression (or something else?) increases contrast or something and causes loss of shadow area detail. If this happens, I go back to the still open original file in Corel and modify the brightness and/or shadow area brightness and resave. I do this until I get a satisfactory image.

- I undo my brightness, resizing and sharpening changes and resize the image to print size, say 1800 x 1200. I create a version at that size for small prints, sharpening a little more than I normally do as prints seem to require this (watch this ... its easy to oversharpen, even for prints).

Something's odd about my CS2 where it's colors are way off from what you will see when you open the image in a browser and view. The color space or something is much more saturated on CS2.. so if I adjust saturation etc using that and save, the resulting color on the display image is very off and disappointing. Don't know what's up with this - another reason I use Corel for those steps.

I need to improve my Photoshop skills to make use of its greater power. Alas, Corel suits my immediate needs.

Oh, and if I want to mask off an image I either use Corel, or I use Fluid Mask, another program I bought for that which is pretty amazing.

G