Originally posted by Rainy Day Incidentally, could anyone point me to any resources on Post-Processing either online or in book form, aimed at someone who doesn't know a whole lot on the subject?
Of course, don't forget to check out the subforum here
"Digital Processing, Software, and Printing."
As for me, I'm an unabashed lover of Adobe Lightroom 3. After trying a number of PP programs that disappointed me either by their limited abilities or difficulty to learn (and/or price), I tried Lightroom hoping it would be better. It has exceeded my expectations by miles, or should I say light years. It takes some time and study to learn all it has to offer, but the good news is that Lightroom is set up with sliders and buttons that make it easy to try, and then quickly see the effects of using it (plus it keeps a running history of all changes off to one side so that you can easily hop around to check out prior iterations). I learned a great deal about Lightroom that way before ever reading a book or watching instructional videos.
But Adobe has excellent tutorials available online for free too, such as
these. If you look on the right of that page you'll see other training videos as well, and Googling for LR training will provide you with more options. If you watch some of the training videos they will show you what Lightroom has to offer.
When I was contemplating buying it, I balked at the price (you can usually find it on sale somewhere for under $200, such as
here). To my way of thinking, that was enough money to help buy a new lens, or at least something more substantial than mere software that was only going to reside on my computer. Now I think it was some of the best money I've ever spent on a photography tool.
Finally, something I really like about Lightroom is that it
feels like a photographer's tool. I never felt that way about Photoshop, for example, which always seemed more like a graphic artist's tool. To me Lightroom for digital photography is a perfect analogue of what the darkroom is to film photography, and so working in it gives one the sense one is doing photography from first picking up the camera to shoot all the way through to the finished image.