Ah, the digital darkroom, the delight of all serious digital photographers. A good digital darkroom is as essential as a good camera if you want to create really great pictures. The center piece of any professional darkroom is Photoshop CS#. It is overkill for most users but when you need the tools or a special filter a difficult job then it's the best.
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Original out of the camera 3456 x 2303 pixels. 100% - 72ppi crop. A bit soft when viewed at screen resolution, as this is, but still quite sharp enough for prints up to about 10 x 12 when printed at 240 ppi. This crop is from a RAW file with no in-camera or Photoshop sharpening, colour, contrast or level adjustments. I used Digital Photo Professional to convert to tiff. | | | 
Sharpened and upsampled to 7248 x 4831 (30" x 20" at 240 ppi) using Resize Pro. Shown at 50% of original size for comparison - 72ppi. This file will print clear and sharp poster size prints on any professional Giclee printer. | |
Fred Miranda, a professional photographer and programmer, has developed some exceptional tools for pro dSLR and consumer digital cameras to clean up, sharpen and enlarge/reduce digital picture files. I bought Fred's Resize Pro plugin for the Rebel 350D and it has proven to be exceptional. At $29 USD I would have paid 4 times the price. It upsamples and sharpens automatically, in a single step, and is matched to the files created for each dSLR camera. Digital Photo Professional, Canon's RAW converter, saves each download session to it's own folder so, once you have the Resize Pro plugin preferences set up the way you want for each lens and size of final print, you can batch a whole folder of files. Resize Pro lets you save settings for specific jobs such as different sizes of prints, subjects, lenses, etc. If you own a Canon dSLR then use Digital Photo Professional and Fred Miranda's Resize Pro plugin. They are the best in my experience. If you own Photoshop CS# then you may prefer to use it. It is also excellent and provides even more filters and tools for image processing. But its upsampling algorithms are not as good as Resize Pro in my experience. You may also have to adjust levels to correct for any error in contrast and white balance. This is very easy to do in Photoshop by using sliders in the Levels dialog. And the feedback is visual and immediate. Adjust the colours to reflect what you want. Be creative. After some experimentation you will be well on your way to producing stunning images. Next you should determine if your image file has enough resolution for the size of print you are going to produce. I prefer to have about 240 to 250 pixels per inch for the Epson Pro printers. This section will grow over time. I'll be adding much more detail about each of these steps as well as showing some examples of images that I have edited.
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