I expect they’ll be coming around and asking to see my license now. Irregularities, you know…

As a fellow software developer, I too try to get off of the computer as quickly as possible.

I don’t know of a good photoshop book actually. I did own one long ago (for something like version 6 of photoshop; I think it was by Bruce Fraser), but I never really used it much. These days I only use photoshop for printing my photos. I do use one or two other image editing programs. You can find my (old) step-by-step tutorials here.

It may surprise you to find out that these days I don’t do much post processing on my photos at all. This is all very contrary to the current “expert” thinking about such things: shoot RAW, tweak your photos with all kinds of manipulations, etc. But I’m a software engineer by day, and spend way too much time in front of a computer already, so I’m loth to spend any more time than necessary in computer post processing. Also, I learned photography back in the film days shooting transparency film: it was very contrasty and blew highlights easily (just like digital). So I learned how to expose correctly for the scene I was shooting, and bracket occasionally when I thought I had a great photo op. These days I shoot JPEG primarily, bracket a bit, compose using my built in aspect ratios and basically try to get as much done in the camera as possible. When I download my images, the most common post processing tweaks are then really simple things like level or curve adjustments, additional cropping, and occasionally distortion or perspective corrections. That’s it! I almost never adjust saturation or build up lots of levels with different effects.

This photo you commented on is a straight JPEG from the camera. No post processing whatsoever.