Over the year I do a lot of photo coaching/mentoring and I get to review a ton of photos. One of the common things I’ll mention to people is that some photos look over-processed (sometimes I like to use the term radioactive) 🙂 Whether you’re using Photoshop, Lightroom, or both keep these tips in mind.
Trust me, I totally get it and I’ve been guilty of it many times myself – especially when I was first learning. In fact, I have a funny and true story. A buddy of mine (who shall remain nameless), was just getting into HDR. One day, he showed me one of his photos and I was like “Dude, you HDR’d the crap out of that”. He was like “No way, I barely did anything to it!”. Seriously though, on a radioactive scale from 1 to 10, this was a solid 8. But he’d been doing these effects so strongly that he was desensitized to it.
It makes sense. When we edit a photo, we rarely move one slider and make this huge adjustment and say “Done!”. It’s a gradual process. We tweak one thing. We tweak another. We tend to move back and forth between settings and adjustments, and even apps. And with HDR, the merged photo is so different than the few photos that made it up, that it’s hard to even think about what your starting point really was. Which means it’s easy to get out of hand.
Our eyes get accustomed to what we’re looking at. Especially if we’re the ones making the changes, our brains have really become wired to accept it and maybe not even think we went that far in editing.
3 Tips To Help You Judge and Avoid Over-Processing Photos
So I figured I’d put together a few tips I use to help avoid over-processed photos. Here goes:
1) I use this one all the time, so read all the way through. It’s the easiest, and one that you’ve probably heard the most… Step Away. But I’m going to take it a bit further and give you an exercise that I use a lot. See, when I’m editing a photo and I think I’m about done, I always do like to step away from it and come back with fresh eyes. But an ever better way to do this is to set the photo up on your monitor in full screen – almost like a wallpaper.
In Photoshop, if you’re editing a photo press the letter F two times to get to Full Screen mode where nothing else in on the screen. Then press Cmd/Ctrl – + to zoom in and fill the screen with the photo.
In Lightroom, just press the letter F to get in to Full Screen mode.
Then leave it be. The longer the better. If you only have a few minutes so be it. I do a lot of my editing at night, so many times I’ll leave it go overnight, and look again in the morning. My computer is usually asleep, and when I jiggle my mouse it wakes up and I see the photo in all of it’s (hopefully) well-processed glory.
2) Look at the photo as a small thumbnail. This sounds weird, but it can really help. Seeing the photo small compresses everything together and can reveal some weird areas that you may not have noticed when it was bigger. This especially happens with portrait retouching – mostly over-whitened eyes or teeth. Not to mention, it’s a great exercise to do because your photo may be seen online as a smaller thumbnail depending on where you share it.
In Photoshop, just press Cmd/Ctrl – (minus) to zoom out. It even helps to go in to Full Screen mode like #1 above.
In Lightroom, just press the letter G to go to Grid view and you’ll see smaller versions of the photos. There’s a slider at the bottom to adjust how large the thumbnails are, so you can play with that too.
And if you don’t believe me on this one, take a look at this image. It’s copied from a YouTube video I did. See the dudes eyes and teeth? Creepy huh? But when editing the photo in that video, everything looked fine. After seeing that thumbnail, I realized that I may have went a bit too far and pulled back some of the settings.
3) Whenever you add a setting, filter (or anything where you can control the Amount or Opacity), I try to start at zero. If you start high, you’ll develop a lessened sensitivity to it pretty quickly. You’ll see the change on screen, and then everything you do after will make you more and more accustomed to the setting that you have right at the start.
Instead, let’s say you’re whitening eyes on a layer in Photoshop. Rather than keep the layer at 100% and decrees it, bring it down to 0% right away. Then gradually raise it until things look good and normal. By starting low, you’ll get a more realistic change as you increase it, than you would if you just kept it at 100% and lowered the settings from there.
As I mentioned earlier, I totally get it. It’s happened to me many times before and I see it happen to people all the time. Try these tips next time you’re editing and I think you’ll find they help you review your photos with fresh eyes, in the hopes of keeping you away from the radioactive photography 🙂
Oh and if you have any tricks you use, I’d love to hear them in the comments below. Thanks and have a good one!
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When I’m creating digital art, I usually end up with 10 or 12 versions. By then I’m almost cross-eyed! I put them in a separate folder & leave them there unseen for a couple of weeks. Then I open them again with extra fresh eyes. Only then do I choose one to upload to my website (or in some cases trash the works). Thanks Matt!
Here’s another place to start low.
A cloning tip: When I use the Clone Stamp I set the opacity relatively low (20 – 30%). This allows me to see the effect is gradual stages. There are plenty of times when 100% is not necessary to make something “Disappear”. Another benefit of using a low opacity is there will be no tell-tale circle (or what ever shape the stamp is) AND if there is a hint of a circle, just move the stamp a bit and one click – even the hint is gone!
Guilty as charged. “Radioactive” describes it well! LOL. Thanks for the tips.
Excellent tips and insights. I’ve been aggressively purging my photo archives (why do we keep so much junk?) and every so often I come across an edited image that makes me go, “What the heck was I thinking?!” Post processing is definitely an area where a “less is more” approach is a plus.
One thing I like to do, not only if I’ve done a bunch of processing but also if I’m unsure if the composition works etc, is to flip the image horizontally for a while. This tricks the brain into seeing the scene like it’s a different photo, and you’re more likely to notice compositional flaws or processing problems. Then I flip it back afterwards or discard my preview sample.
Great idea!
I used to use that trick of turning the print upside down when i was spotting my B&W prints with photo dyes to remove spots add emphasis on certain lines etc and it’s amazing what you see that you don’t the right way up.
B&W darkroom prints made with chemicals and photo dyes – oh how old am I lol
Reference your leaving the image on full screen makes a lot of sense (which I use) but perhaps another way is to print out the image – larger better – and put on the wall and look at it for a couple of days and mark-up the areas that need correcting……….. I find that is a better way as you are looking at the print perhaps in different light values during the day /night. In order to obtain “gallery” quality you may have to do printing several times before final printing
My “step back/full screen/thumbnail ” technique is to take the top photos from my shoot(usually about 10 or so) and set them as a slide show for desktop background and screen saver. That way every time I’m looking at my computer I will be looking at the photos. It really helps if you have them on a laptop and can set it down near to where you are doing other things and you can glance at the screen. This also allows me to narrow those top photos down more, especially if you have 2 different edits or 2 different shots of same subject. This can also work for the thumbnail step if you are farther away from your computer.
Evolution! Such a long way from when we’d first crossed paths. Kudos my friend.
You brought up something that Id like to elaborate on…
Thumbnails.
One of the beast ways to avoid over vignetting images is to look at them in thumbnail mode. In this mode you will see a what seems to be a more pronounced expression of whatever level of vignette you’ve applied.
A good rule of thumb is.. if the vignette is readily apparent int he thumbnail…you’ve gone too far.
Awesome tip! Yes, thumbnails show a lot of flaws in the photo. Thanks man!
Wonderful tips…will check them all THANKS!
I also suggest using the auto adjust first in Lightroom. If it looks good, avoid too much fiddling afterward. Also pix tend to look far better than you may realize from the large screen version when you post to facebook.
My little rule of thumb – whatever setting I adjust, say vibrance, if I end up at for example at 37% looking good, I will reduce it automatically to 25% so I can’t “see” the change so much. Everything seems to come out much more natural.
Yes I edit at night and usually with a few glasses of wine like Lesa Snyder so I know now to wait until the AM to post after reviewing it!
In PS, I keep my eye whitening and teeth whitening on separate layers and when I think I’m done, I’ll flip those layers on and off a few times. The comparison with the original acts as a useful baseline to see what I’ve really done.
Similar tricks (flipping between history states) work for LR sliders.
The direct comparison between before and after skips past those desensitizing intermediate steps.
When in Lightroom i use the “” key as well. Its switching between the original and the process one. Sometimes a nice indication to see if you are pushing it to much.