Defog

Nichole - Sara said digital images have a "fog" on them (regardless of whether you shoot in RAW of JPEG) because of digital noise that isn't present if you shoot in film. I don't entirely understand it; here is what eHow had to say:

If you are just getting into photography, you'll often hear people talk about "defogging" their pictures. This can be confusing at first but it is actually really easy. Digital cameras tend to make your photos look fuzzy, or foggy, like they have a film over them. You can easily get rid of this with the unsharp mask filter, but remember that this is different than sharpening! The unsharp mask settings increase the contrast of the photo in a way that gets rid of that foggy look. You should defog your pictures before you do any other editing and then sharpen for print at the end of your editing.

So basically, you just need to use the unsharp mask as the first step in editing. The explanation above helps reconcile what Jen told you guys about sharpening as your LAST edit. From what I understand, you DEFOG first and SHARPEN last. Confused yet? Me too.

Here's the link to the eHow article which also walks you through using the unsharp mask in Photoshop.