Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Process

  • Limiting File Size

    Limiting File Size

    In a previous article I talked about the “bloat” that happens when we edit in Photoshop. Is there anything we can do about it? Should we be concerned about limiting file size?

    RAW vs Tiff

    RAW files are fundamentally different from Photoshop files. A RAW file captures and preserves the data directly from the camera sensor. This data still contains the artifacts from the Bayer filter technology, that is, each pixel represents 1 value of red, green, or blue. Data in this form cannot be shown on your computer monitor until it is processed and expanded by a RAW converter like Lightroom Classic.

    It is very important to realize that this data is unaltered, no matter what fancy processing you do in your RAW editor. The adjustments you make are kept as a collection of “processing instructions”. These are applied in real time whenever you view your RAW file.

    Because of this design, Lightroom can only change the look of pixels. It cannot in any way add or remove or alter individual pixels. No matter what it looks like on screen.

    For instance, even if you use the Healing tool to completely remove a person or object from the picture, the original data is always still there. What it saves is instructions telling it what region to select and what region to copy from. This processing is applied, again, each time you view the image in the editor. Actually, it usually just keeps an edited preview of the image to show quickly, but that is getting too deep.

    Photoshop manipulates pixels

    Photoshop, though, is the heavy duty pixel pusher. It has no moral imperative to prevent you from doing anything to image data. You can freely add or remove or alter or stretch or shrink or copy over anything. Unless you take steps to edit non-destructively (more on that later), you can remove something from the image by simply copying other pixels over the area you want to remove. The original data is permanently gone. Photoshop doesn’t care.

    To do this level of manipulation requires Photoshop to expand the original RAW data to a pixel structure. The pixel data has 3 values, red, green, and blue, for each pixel and each of the values is probably 16 bits if you are editing in one of the “safer” color spaces. I recommend it. This expansion automatically makes Photoshop’s file size at least 3 times larger than the RAW file.

    Once the file has been expanded to pixels and edited, there is no going back. It cannot be reprocessed back into a RAW file. You can’t put the genie back into the bottle.

    Even RAW files can get big

    I am presenting this in a rather black & white (metaphorically) contrast. RAW file editing is no longer immune from growing quite large. The “culprit” is masks.

    It used to be that RAW processing was rather coarse and simple. If I adjusted the exposure of the image it applied to the entire image. And the processing instruction was small and simple. This is the literal data that is saved for that adjustment:

    crs:Exposure2012=”+0.65″

    Don’t worry about the exact meaning of all of it, That is for the Engineers. The point is that only these literal 24 characters are stored to change the exposure of the entire image.

    But then the designers at Adobe and others created very useful and necessary magic. We can mask areas and selectively adjust them! This is an awesome and very welcome change. It pushes back the boundary where we have to go to Photoshop to finish our files. These masks and edits are stored as text with the other processing instructions. As you might guess, it can get large.

    After doing a lot of masking and editing I have seen some of these “sidecar” files grow into 10 megabytes or more. So if my original RAW file is 50 MBytes and the editing instructions add another 20 MBytes, that is quite a lot bigger. Still nothing like going to Photoshop, but I needed to point out that RAW processing is not entirely free.

    Non-destructive editing

    Please give me a moment to plug a non-destructive editing style in Photoshop. Photoshop can do amazing and totally un-undoable things. I know that I often change my mind or have new insights about an image after it ages a while. So weeks of months or more after an initial edit, I may look at an image again and see a different direction to be taken. If the Photoshop edit has gone down a path of no return, this can be hard.

    Sure, I could go all the way back to the original RAW file and start over, but this is usually not what I want to do. I don’t want to repeat the hours of detailed work I already did. Typically there was a branch, a fork in the road while I was editing. I chose one path and later I decide I would like to explore the other one.

    With discipline, Photoshop edits can be almost totally non-destructive. This means you can undo any decision later. Or perhaps strengthen or reduce the effects of an edit.

    Probably 2 techniques serve for about 80% of the goal of non-destructive editing. The first is to use a new blank layer for pixel changing edits. So if I want to remove an element from the image, I will typically create a blank layer, then use stamp or move to overlay changes onto the image. the original information is still there is I later want to expose it or do a better job of removing it.

    The second powerful technique is adjustment layers. Use adjustment layers rather than doing adjustment directly to the image layers. This allows the adjustments to be changed in the future. It also allows for masking to limit the effects to selected areas.

    Steps to limit Photoshop file size

    It is a tradeoff: do all your processing in Lightroom or go into Photoshop. Adobe and others are constantly pushing out the boundary by giving us more and more power and capability in our RAW editors. This is very welcome.

    But there comes a point when we may have to do things Lightroom cannot do. There are things we can do to limit the overall Photoshop growth to the minimum, about 3 times the original RAW size. Basically, these destroy the non-destructive edits I recommended before. So all of those edit layers can be flattened down before saving the file.

    This commits the edits permanently. They can’t be undone in the future. But the file size will be smaller. And rasterizing smart layers will save a lot of space. Also making changes permanent.

    If it sounds like I am negative on doing this, I am. Once I invest a lot of time editing an image in Photoshop it becomes the “master” image. I usually want to keep the freedom to change my mind.

    Why bother?

    Maybe it’s the wrong attitude, but I try to act as if the file size does not matter. A large file is just a price to pay for the ability to craft an image I am pleased with. Disks are relatively cheap.

    It’s a pain when I out grow the 4GByte limit for Tiff files and have to go to a .psb file. Lightroom does a bad job of the user experience. But I put up with it because I want to hold all that work in an editable state.

    So officially my attitude is “why bother?”. Don’t sweat the file size growth. You went to Photoshop for a reason. Use it. Do your work. Files get large, It’s just a cost of doing business.

    Today’s image

    This is an example of a very simple looking file that grew dramatically. The final Photoshop file is 22 times larger than the edited RAW file!. From 61.5 MBytes to 1.34 GBytes. It sure doesn’t look that complex. It was necessary and I would still do it the same way again.

  • Don’t Repeat Yourself

    Don’t Repeat Yourself

    Your parents or teachers probably told you this when you were growing up. Generally it’s good advice, but I am going to take it to a different context. In our work as artists, we must be careful to not become complacent and stop trying new things. Don’t repeat yourself artistically.

    Stuck in a rut

    We’ve all been there, haven’t we. Going over the same ground all the time. Playing it safe, Not trying anything new. It is the easy path. Or, it seems like it for a while.

    Sometimes we feel trapped by success. Gallerists are quick to label us as something to make it easier to know who to sell to a client. So we may become known as that flower photographer, or a street photographer, or the guy who does abstract composites.

    Whatever our label is, it often serves as a limit on our freedom. If our success is measured in sales then we become reluctant to do anything to jeopardize our supposed success.

    Let me use Thomas Kincade as an example. I’m not criticizing him, and besides, he is dead. If you say his name you immediately know what one of his pictures looks like. He was a factory. I never talked to him, but I wonder if he ever wanted to paint something other than the cute little English cottages with dramatic lighting. Some of his work was interesting to me until it became monotonous.

    I can’t be critical of you, either. I don’t know your motivation. Perhaps you love a certain subject so much that that is all you want to do. Great. But still look for ways to bring freshness to what you do. Don’t just do the same thing over and over. That is crippling and repetitious.

    Challenge yourself

    Who are you competing with? Isn’t it yourself? You may have a favorite artist you would like to be like, but you can’t. They are them and you are you. You have your own set of talents and values and perceptions. No one else will see the world quite like you do.

    If that is so, then you are your own standard and critic. I better be doing work that matches my standards and interests. I am the one I have to please.

    It is apparent to me from my history that without new challenges to excite me I become stale, bored. Once I have done a subject or a theme enough to feel I “got it”, whatever that may mean, I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m done with that. I need continued challenge to keep me fresh.

    Some of my students are surprised when they learn that I am still experimenting and trying new things (for instance, I have started only recently to use focus stacking with regularity). They assume that my creativity has fully matured because I am somewhat established (old). But when we experiment — testing not only our tools’ limitations but also our creative sensibilities — we help ourselves to grow creatively and our work to remain fresh.

    Chuck Kimmerle in Nature Vision Magazine, #1

    Going back over the same ground too many times makes me complacent. No new challenges remain. I have nothing fresh to say about it. And it doesn’t hold any terror for me.

    It should be scary

    Terror??! Yes. Maybe that is too dramatic, but trying something new is scary. There is a strong fear of failure. The old “imposter syndrome” kicks in big time and makes us doubt our capability.

    But for us, the fear is overwhelmed by the knowledge that I have new ideas that I have to try it. It could be a complete failure, but I won’t know unless I try. And I have to try, because it could be the next step in my development as an artist. Without trying this new thing I am cheating myself and letting myself believe I’m not good enough or creative enough to do it.

    The fear of the unknown becomes less than the pressure within us to try it. Holding back is the beginning of a death spiral. Fear and inertia sets is and it becomes harder and harder to move on to new experiences.

    Doing something new is scary. You are not sure you can do it, you won’t be good at it at first, you are not sure it even works for you. but you won’t know unless you do it. An artist has this drive in him that compels him to push on to new things. To shove aside some of the limits that are around him now and let his creativity flow in a new direction. The challenge of creativity makes the obstacles seem small.

    Moving target

    I don’t know if it has occurred to you or not, but the line where we move into the challenge area is a moving target. That is, as we confront our fears and push into new areas and become proficient, now we need further challenges. You may, at first, see this as a problem, but actually it is a good thing.

    It is a good thing because we will never get stale. There are always new challenges to confront. Your art should excite you. To excite you, you will have to keep it fresh and alive. We can find new limits to push against. So we have a lifelong learning and growth opportunity. It is up to us. It is like a fractal figure. No matter how far we push into it, there is always new shape to discover. Will we accept the challenge to grow or stay in our comfort zone and eventually stagnate?

    What limits you?

    What limits you? It is easy to blame external things: those judges didn’t appreciate my work, those galleries can’t see what I am trying to do, I can’t “break into the club”. Don’t waste your energy on blaming those things. They are just there, like taxes. Keep trying, but realize you can’t control them.

    And remind yourself that the only judge and critic of your work that matters is you. Are you happy with your work? Don’t be complacent. Set your standards high, higher than is reasonable. Exciting work doesn’t come from low goals. They are your standards. This is the bar you have to try to clear. Not something someone else sets for you.

    I started with the idea of not repeating yourself. I hope you see it in a higher context of pushing yourself to new levels of vision and technical achievement. It is your art, it is your life. Be the best you can be. If you are happy with your art, that is the audience that counts most.

    Don’t repeat yourself means be always growing and finding new ways to express yourself.

  • The Magic of the Frame – 2

    The Magic of the Frame – 2

    All 2 dimensional art exists within a frame. It is a constraint imposed on us. It can also be beneficial, because it requires choices. This is the magic of the frame. This article is an expansion on a discussion of the frame I did several years ago.

    Finite

    I do 2 dimensional art. Most paintings or photographs are. But besides being flat, 2 dimensional works are also bounded. They cannot extend to infinity, although they may capture images of near infinity.

    So a print may be 20×30 inches, or maybe 6×9 feet, but there is a limit. A print of a landscape scene is not the size of the original scene.

    And because the print is bounded, there are edges. The edges create the frame, or more precisely the bounding rectangle of the image. I am assuming rectangular prints for the discussion. So in simple physical terms, the frame is the box that encloses the print.

    Why rectangular?

    Most paintings and photographs, and therefore their frames, are traditionally rectangular. Have you wondered why? And why and how a round lens makes a rectangular image?

    I have looked into this and have found technical reasons and pragmatic reasons, but no real answer. Lenses are round for a good reason – they are easier to make and making them rectangular would introduce lots of distortion. The lens throws a circular image on the focal plane of the camera. The the light that falls outside of the sensor is cropped. We never see those parts.

    Sensors are rectangular for technical and pragmatic reasons. Sensors are very large silicon chips made by normal semiconductor processes. Rectangular chips pack efficiently on a wafer. If they were, say, round, there would be lots of wasted space between chips. Since they are very expensive to make, the manufacturers are anxious to minimize costs. Also, digital cameras mimicked film cameras which exposed rectangular patches on film. Again for efficiency to maximize the film use.

    And finally we expect prints and images to be rectangular. It is the convention developed over centuries of painting. And it is less expensive to make and frame rectangular prints and canvases.

    So rectangular prints are conventional and the path of least resistance.

    A window

    The frame, though, is much more than the constraint of the shape of the sensor or print. Something magical happens when we look through the viewfinder or crop our image in our processing software.

    What we see through the viewfinder becomes our window onto the world. This window in where we pour much of our creativity. As we move and zoom and continue to examine our subject through this window we decide how we want to present it. What is important to bring out. What should be excluded.

    We may realize the interest is not the whole scene, but only certain parts of it., and they should be presented from a certain point of view. So we adjust our window and keep searching for the magic.

    After all, if we are an artist we want to bring something to our viewers that is more than just what anyone would have shot if they walked up on the scene. We bring our own interpretation. Part of this is what we chose to have in our window.

    Composition

    Over the centuries many “rules” of composition have been formed. I put it in quotes because there are no real rules. The “rules” are observations of patterns that have been found to be generally pleasing to viewers.

    It was very interesting to me to realize that most of these “rules” are relative to the frame. Let’s take a look at a few.

    The rule of thirds helps to increase dynamic tension by placing the subject along the intersection points of dividing the window into 3 groups horizontally and 3 groups vertically. This is totally relative to the frame.

    Along with that is the oft quoted “do not put the subject in the center” – of the frame.

    The horizon should be level – relative to the frame.

    Diagonals can add a lot of interest to many compositions. The diagonals exist because of their relation to the frame.

    Leading lines are often recommended. They help encourage the viewer’s eye to lead from the frame to the subject and keep them exploring.

    We need to be careful to not have distracting elements at the edges of the frame.

    Unless it is really your intent, we must be careful to not cut the subject off at the edge of the frame.

    This could go on a long time. Go examine your favorite composition rules and see if they are not mostly describing relationships to the frame.

    Artist’s judgement

    So really, at one level, the work of an artist is to arrange the elements within the frame in the most pleasing or impactful way. This is the magic of the frame. It is the canvas where we compose. It is the crucible where our creativity is tested.

    Since the camera sensor captures everything in the frame, it is not only critical to arrange the elements as we wish, but it may be as important to know what to exclude. That is one of the tricks of photography. What is in view of the sensor will be in our image unless we consciously figure out how to eliminate it.

    I think Henri Cartier-Bresson had great insight when he said “A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up.” There are amazing scenes all around us. We have to see them then be able to compose them to create a great image.

    Much of the artistry is in working the frame: figuring out what is significant and how to present it within the frame. It is the stage where we work our magic. The frame is more important in our work than we usually express. This is what, to me, is the magic of the frame.

    This image

    This illustrates framing. The diagonals and leading lines make it much more dynamic. I was intentional about what to include and exclude and how to frame it. At least, as much as I could on a tossing sailboat in a strong wind.

  • My Favorite Lens

    My Favorite Lens

    In general, we photographers love our equipment, Especially our lenses. It is not uncommon to have a favorite one. You can always get a discussion/fight started among photographers when you talk about lenses. I would like to discuss what has become my favorite lens.

    Lenses

    The lens is a critically important piece of equipment to photographers. Sensors are improving dramatically and lenses have to improve with them to achieve all the sharpness and resolution the sensor can capture.

    Modern lenses constantly improve in resolution. Look at DxO image tests of current best lenses vs. the best from 20 years ago. Our lenses now enable us to capture more information and be able to produce wall-size prints that are extremely sharp.

    The lens determines the point of view that is captured in our frame. It establishes the field of view, the width of the scene we are capturing. Some of us naturally have a telephoto view. Others have a wide angle view. This refers to the lens choice we tend to select to frame our subjects. This is just personal preference. The lens is a tool to help express our esthetic.

    Many photographers feel they need a whole bag full of lenses of various focal lengths from extreme wide angle to super telephoto, with macro lenses and tilt/shiftes thrown in. Because, you never know what you might find. 🙂 Personally I have simplified my life a lot over time. I generally only carry a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm in my kit. But that is just me and where I am at right now.

    So what we want is a lens or lenses that allow us to capture all the information we want (resolution, sharpness, dynamic range) in the field of view we want. A big ask, but doable.

    Digital workflow

    Most of us are in the digital world now. The digital workflow is quite different from the analog workflow.

    What we call the analog workflow – the film days- involved developers and enlargers and prints and lots of chemicals and time. Personally, these are days I don’t miss. I am a big fan of the power and freedom and flexibility we have now.

    There is a corresponding workflow for digital processing, though. It includes loading images on our computer, viewing them, culling or grading them, processing selects with our software of choice, etc. Each of theses steps is time consuming. Especially since we tend to shoot so many more frames now that they “don’t cost anything”. And each step requires software and considerable training.

    The result, though, is that we spend a lot of time in front of our computer now. We probably spend more time in the digital workflow than we did in the analog workflow.

    My favorite lens

    What does this have to do with a discussion of my favorite lens? Well, in a sense the “lens” I use the most and that has the most impact on my work is my computer monitor.

    This is where I view all my images. Zoomed in to 100% I look at individual pixels. Here is where I crop and color correct and adjust tones and contrast and saturation. This is where I view and edit the image when I convert it to black & white. When I create new images by compositing others together, that is done entirely though the monitor “lens”.

    Yes, all of the things I just said are actually done through specialized software. In my case it is primarily Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. But metaphorically and to me, the monitor is the lens into the process.

    Now days the monitor is where we view everything we do. Regardless of what the original image looked like, what I see in the monitor at the end of the edits is what counts. The result could be a complete re-imagining of the starting image.

    The new primary lens

    I spend more time in front of my monitor than I do outside shooting. More and more it is coming to dominate my workflow. If I lost or broke a lens, that would be terrible, but I could continue doing my art with other lenses with only minor re-adjustments to my vision. I had this experience recently. My 24-70 lens dropped and shattered the polarizer filter. I was up in the mountains and I did not have a filter wrench with me to get the jammed filter off, so I had to switch to using an alternate lens. A little frustrating, but not a big deal.

    But if my computer died, although I could continue shooting, I could not view or process a single image until I fixed it. Eventually things would back up to a critical point and I would have to get the computer back. I also couldn’t select images for galleries or process images for printing. Dead in the water.

    So in a sense, the focal point of the digital workflow is the monitor. That is the new lens I use to view and do most of my work. The monitor is the lens for the increasingly important part of the digital workflow.

    The future

    In the future will this trend increase or will we return to simpler times? What do you think?

    My money would be on the increase of digital processing. We will trend more toward an attitude that the camera and lenses are used to gather raw material, but pictures are actually made in the computer, looking through the monitor. Increasingly, the final image may look less and less like the original capture. Better processing software opens up new possibilities. And viewers are more willing to accept that photography should create something more than a true representation of reality.

    So the next time you are lusting for a wonderful new lens, it might be better to upgrade your monitor instead.

  • Going too far

    Going too far

    We often hear this as a challenge or criticism. “You’re going too far” Meaning, back off. But as an artist, I don’t think I go far enough. I need to push myself to be always going too far. That is how we explore the limits

    Too timid

    I have written about this before, but it is so important I think it deserves a refresh. In a previous article I encouraged us to go “far enough“. But I think now this is too timid an attitude. We should push “it”, whatever it is, too far.

    I know I tend to have too much focus on the actual captured data of the file and what the scene really looked like. Time helps. I tend now to wait to process images until they have aged enough to let me distance myself from the experience of being there.

    But still, I tend to hold back and stay too true to the original. I am learning to push beyond to create something else.

    As a bonus, this short video by Matt Kloskowski might encourage you to think about editing in new ways. He does not talk much about going too far, but he shows an unconventional approach. The kind of thing I am talking about when I recommend pushing beyond the captured data.

    Push it

    I know I’ve said it before, but I find truth in something John Paul Caponigro said “You don’t know you’ve gone far enough until you’ve gone too far.”

    This is something I need to take to heart. The engineer in me tends to make the image look like the literal, original scene. That ends up creating record shots. Sometimes all I need is a record shot, but that is rare. I have to push it more to make the image into art. Into something interesting that goes beyond the original.

    For example, I live in Colorado. If I shoot a beautiful scene in the mountains, so what? Anyone could have stopped there that day and taken the same picture with their cell phone. What sets mine apart? It often will be something more than just the literal scene. It has to rely on my interpretation of what I saw.

    Be decisively indecisive

    So when I suggest going too far, I am not speaking about relationships or physical safety, but my interpretation of the image. I am discovering more and more with time that images can take a great deal of manipulation.

    A raw file from a good camera contains a tremendous amount of data that can be exploited. Editing in Lightroom is completely non-destructive. We can re-edit at will with absolutely no loss. Likewise, although Photoshop is inherently destructive, there are processing techniques that can be used to manipulate images with no damage and with the ability to re-edit in the future. I strongly advise learning and adopting these techniques.

    Yes, I know of good artists who can say they know exactly what they want to do with an image and it is OK to do destructive edits, because they will never change their mind in the future. That is not me. Every time I revisit an image I usually tweak it some. Sometimes a lot.

    Does that mean I am indecisive? Perhaps. I wouldn’t argue the point. I look at it as an evolving artistic judgment. What I see and feel in an image can change over time. So I consciously decide to use techniques to give me the maximum flexibility to change my mind later. Decisively indecisive.

    Don’t worry about breaking it

    Let me use Lightroom (“Classic”, because I consider it the only real Lightroom) as an example. I said that all editing in Lightroom is non-destructive. Do you really understand that?

    Lightroom uses a marvelous design that always preserves the original data unchanged and keeps all edits as a separate set of processing instructions. Don’t believe me? Here is a portion of actual data from the XMP sidecar file of an image I edited today:

    crs:WhiteBalance=”As Shot”
    crs:Temperature=”5650″
    crs:Tint=”-14″
    crs:Exposure2012=”+0.50″
    crs:Contrast2012=”+6″
    crs:Highlights2012=”+19″
    crs:Shadows2012=”0″
    crs:Whites2012=”0″
    crs:Blacks2012=”-12″
    crs:Texture=”0″
    crs:Clarity2012=”+20″
    crs:Dehaze=”0″
    crs:Vibrance=”+5″
    crs:Saturation=”0″

    If you are familiar with Lightroom, you should recognize these adjustments as the contents of the Basic adjustment panel. I’m not sure what the “2012” suffix means on them, but probably a process version. Anyway, this is literal data copied from the XMP file. It is an industry standard format called XML markup. It is just text. If I change a slider, the text value is changed. These text values are read and re-applied when I open the file in Lightroom. The original pixel data is never altered. You cannot destroy the image by editing it in Lightroom.

    What are the limits?

    There are limits, but not absolutes. If we boost the exposure too much, at some point we will introduce an unacceptable amount of noise. If we sharpen too much we will introduce artifacts around edges. We can make such a high contrast image that it cannot reproduce properly on screen or in print. We can increase saturation to the point that it is out of gamut for the screen or print.

    Most of these are sort of a judgment call by the artist of what the acceptable limit is for the intended application.

    But these are just physical limits of what we can do with the tools. The bigger problem, at least for me, is what am I willing to do?

    It’s our mindset we need to break

    I am the one who usually limits the extents of the changes I will make. I am still too much of a left-brained engineer who is constrained by my memory of what the scene actually looked like.

    One way I can tell this is happening is that it is common for me to push an image further every time I revisit it. Upon seeing it again, I think,”that is nice, but I can go further”. And I do. Sometimes the image turns into something different from what I shot. I love it when that happens.

    But it is a constant struggle to give myself permission to do it. I am afraid of going too far.

    Knowing how the tools work and how to non-destructively edit, I should feel free to slam adjustments to the limits just to see what happens. Then back off to the “right” value for the image. I find that the “right” value tends to be higher if I have over-corrected than it is if I come up from the original. I think this is what Mr. Caponigro means when he says “You don’t know you’ve gone far enough until you’ve gone too far.”

    Give yourself the freedom to go too far, than back off as necessary. I will try to do the same.

    Not for everyone

    I know this advice is not for everyone. I still see photographers who say they pride themselves in getting the image “right” in camera and doing minimal editing. That’s their style and their values, so good for them. But if “right” means the closest match possible to the real scene, that seems very limiting. I think we have progressed well beyond the stage of assuming that a photography must be a true representation of reality.

    At least, that is my assumption. I operate from the point of view that I am as free to creatively imagine the contents of my frame as a painter is to create on a blank canvas. Even plein air painters take a lot of liberties with what they choose to include or exclude, what colors to use, etc. Some even use the plein air session as a sketch. Later in the studio they refine and complete it according to their interpretation.

    That is basically what I do. Some images require more interpretation than others, and my tools allow more freedom for manipulation. One reason I think I could never paint is there is no “undo” with paint. 🙂

    Go too far

    So I am discovering that what works for me is to consciously push my adjustments beyond what I first think is right. Yes, it may create a bizarre effect and I have to back it off. But I often find that the new setting I back it off to is more extreme than I thought was correct originally. Seeing the extreme helped me understand a new way to view the image.

    If you do it right, you can’t damage the image. Give yourself permission to experiment.

    Example

    The image with this article is an example. This is the mountains and plains about 5 miles from my home. It seems like every time I go back to the image, I need to tweak it a little. And I always push it a little further. I do not back off of what I already did. I think I am nearly to “far enough”.