My Basic Work Flow

 Step 1: Levels

  The first thing I do when I open up an image is adjust levels to bring some of the dynamic range back. This cuts out some of the flatness you get with digital photography. It's a bit closer to a film quality. When you open the levels histogram, you have three arrows you can drag around. At the beginning and the end of the histogram you typically have areas that are flat (have no information). The goal is to drag the 1^st and 3^rd arrow to areas with the first bit of information. You can also move the middle arrow around to play with the balance of exposure. In this image I only needed to move the 1^st arrow up. Notice the flat area at the beginning of this histogram. It has been highlighted in red. 

Step 2: Lens Correction

    Lens correction is my second step. I use a middle of line Tamron lens as my all around shooter. The optics are fairly nice and clear, however there's some issues with frame alignment. I am also short and do not always have something to step on when I shoot. The lens correction tool allows me to correct the angle and perspective. The best way to master this tool is to go in and play. As you're making changes, the image may get fuzzy but when you click ok to go back to the work space, the image will be clear again. Note that I'm on the custom tab and not the auto correction tab.

Step 3: Photo Filter

   My 3^rd step is to chose a photo filter to begin color correction. My corny joke is that I am a cool girl. I always tend to correct on the cooler side. The 82 cooling filter was my favorite in film and it's my favorite in digital. This image was very warm to begin with because of the angle of the sunlight. I throw my digital cooling filter on and good bye warm. Of course this causes over cooling in certain areas. I address this in the next steps.

Step 4: Color Balance

   In the next step I open up the color balance tool. Technically I could have started from here but I feel it's easier to work with this after a initial photo filter. The key to this is to look for an area in the frame that you know should be white. Play with your arrows until that area is perfectly white with out a discernible cast of another color. After this, I still have overly cooled areas and her red tights are muted. We'll fix that in the next step.

Step 5: Hue/Saturation

  Finally, I make fine adjustments with the hue/saturation tool. There is a drop down that allows you to play with different color channels. In this image, to remove some of the blue cast off the white wall, I drop the saturation of the blue and cyan channels to -100. This also makes my blacks blacker. I also nudged the red channel up to +17. If there are other blues or reds you do not want affected by this changes, use the mask tool to block them out. Luckily that wasn't an issue for this image so easy peasy down.

Here is the before and after. 

 

Hope this was helpful. Please feel free to ask questions in the comment section.

Corey