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Friend of mine called me out on over-editing my portraits
Last week a buddy who does film photography looked at my digital work and said "you've smoothed everything until it looks like plastic." He pointed out I'd removed the freckles and skin texture from a model shot I did in Portland. After staring at it for ten minutes I realized he was right - my stuff looked like airbrushed ads instead of actual people. Any other digital artists struggle with knowing when to stop fixing things?
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foster.tessa14h ago
My sister spent three hours editing a zit out of a photo once, then posted it and someone said "great lighting" and she nearly cried lol. Sometimes we get so deep into fixing tiny things we forget the whole point of the picture.
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ross.lily13h ago
Haha stop, it's just a zit though right? I mean I get wanting a photo to look good but three hours is wild. People really get in their own heads about this stuff. Someone says "nice lighting" and she nearly cried over it? Come on, the person was just being nice, not evaluating her editing skills. Sometimes I think we just need to post the photo and move on with our lives.
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@foster.tessa nailed it with the zit story. That reminds me of a buddy who spent two days fixing the color of a single brick in a wall behind his subject. He finally showed me the shot and I couldn't even see the brick he was talking about until he zoomed in 400 percent. He had this whole thing about the brick being too orange and throwing off the whole mood. I told him maybe step back and look at the photo like a normal person would. The problem is we stare at these files for hours and our brains start making up problems that don't exist in the real world.
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