ok, I'm new to this forum and just bought Adobe photoshop. I'm wondering what the normal fix up would be for all of the family shots I have. Here is a typical shot. What general touch ups would you suggest?

Thanks!

First off welcome to the forum and what a great looking family!

As for touch up suggestions:
1. Crop image to focus on family (this is really the only thing I see that you need for this particular photo)

2. Tone Correction: Levels or Curves adjustment layer to boost colors (such as setting the white and black points). Many people use the Levels Adjustment layer to accomplish this. Add a levels adjustment layer and view the histogram. If the histogram does not extend to its endpoints, the image does not contain its maximum tonal range. To correct this move the end triangles to the beginning of each side of the histogram. In this case, the histogram looks good, but I went ahead and set the white point (highlights) to the lightest area of the photo and the black point (shadows) to the darkest area of the photo to pump up the colors a bit.

3. Enhance Color using Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer. Use the master setting to adjust the overall saturation or select individual colors to boost specific color tones. You can apply a mask to this layer to further control the saturation in selected areas.

4. Add a Luminosity Layer (Ctrl >Alt > ~) then set mode to screen and adjust opacity to desire amount to brighten image. This is a quick and easy technique to quickly brighten the highlights in your photo.

5. For a final step you may want to sharpen the photo slightly with the unsharp mask (USM). (Odd name, but you sharpen an image with the USM filter). You can apply this to the entire photo or just to selected areas such as the eyes.

Now this is a small photo so I can’t really see the details, but other possible steps could include removing blemishes and fly away hair with the healing brush or clone tool as well as whitening teeth and so on.

Hi Tiink, Welcome to Retouch Pro, the only thing that really struck me was the composition could be improved by cropping tighter.