so much indecision on how much to change in an image

[391615]

I have been editing a whole lot of files for my website, and I'm finding it difficult to determine a good level of lighting or colour or sharpness.

Usually I grab an image and if it looks a little white I lower the lighting down using levels to keep the main subject with good lines. I don't like my photos bright, if I'm seeing too much white light, I hate it. Sometimes I don't know when to stop though. I usually then do an unsharp mask to sharpen up the image a little. Sometimes I go overboard and use the unsharp feature to really bring out the lines, I like the look sometimes especially with strong colours and lines. Then I add maybe 10-15 for the saturation. this is all I do unless some touching up is needed. I'm well aware after lots of mistakes with saturation, I don't really saturate portraits, It doesn't take much to ruin the skin colour.

What does everyone else here do when they get their images.

 

[dbrandon]

I suppose it depends on what purpose the image is serving. I too find it very hard to get to an outcome which i'm happy with, so i usually end up over-doing the editing.

I usually just play around in Lightroom which prevents me from doing anything too drastic, but sometimes i do have a good bash at a photo in Photoshop when heavy editing / retouching is required.

I don't think there's anything wrong with editing pictures heavily, but i personally try to avoid making an image look too 'fake'.

All personal taste

 

[patrickt]

FWIW, I can totally screw up a decent shot with Lightroom.

I understand the indecision. I have a friend who is a professional photographer and loves PS. I asked him to stop by and I had 13 photos I had selected, each of which had a specific problem. Since he'd never used Lightroom, I did what I would normally do on the photos and asked his opinion on the results. He made a couple of suggestions but said overall it was good. He was also very impressed at how quickly the changes were made with Lightroom. He said doing the same thing in PS would have taken longer. Of course, he also pointed out things he could do in PS that LR doesn't do.

It made me feel more comfortable with my editing. If it had been an option, I would have liked for him to do the editing while I watched.