Going too far with an edit is something we have all been guilty of at some point, and it is something for which the temptation never quite disappears. Here are seven signs you have taken that edit of your landscape image from refined to gaudy and what you can do to fix or avoid the issue.
Coming to you from Mike Smith, this helpful video discusses seven common over-editing mistakes and what you can do to fix or avoid them. Over-editing is something that we all do from time to time, but being able to catch it before you post the image or even better, in the midst of the edit is where the skill really lies. One thing that helps me a lot is to continually toggle the backslash key on and off in Lightroom, as this will switch back and forth between the unedited and edited versions of your image, making it easy to keep an eye on just how far you are pushing things. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Smith.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out "Photographing The World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing with Elia Locardi."
I refer back to the original often. Once I spent a lot of time editing, just to find that I had edited in a "circle," so to speak. There was a lot of similarity between the original and the final product, with big differences in between. I started again, and went down from fifteen steps to just three.
As a bass player in covers bands for over 25 years, I've caught myself doing exactly the same thing. You add effects and processors to the signal chain to achieve a certain sound, and then find yourself adding more to add something else that's missing in the tone. Then out of the blue for one reason or another, you take it all away and realise what you was looking for was there all along and was being masked by having too much processing.
It's an easy rabbit hole to fall down in all creative fields. Less is usually more.