Originally Posted by
flyingSquirrel
When I compare your version with mine, I see how flat, bland, and soft mine looks. This was troubling for me to digest because I've always had a fear of overdoing it in editing, and now I need to rethink and change my definition and judgement about what really is overdone. I jumped into LR and had a go at a variety of different images, doing relatively quick edits from where they were, just stepping things up quite a bit. So I cranked up the contrast, tweaked the curves, went heavy on the sharpness, and so on. In a high percentage of those cases, I compared the new version with the older edited version, and what I thought was good before looked rather bland and flat compared to the stepped up version. A number of complications arise now. One is that I need to somehow figure out how to tell when things are looking correct and realistic, and not go too far. As noted, since I thought things looked good to me before, the stronger edits feel a bit uncomfortable for me, despite the fact that in general they have more impact. I've always been fearful that I will slowly creep further and further into over the top edits until I can no longer tell when something looks proper because I would continue to feel "it's not enough." You may be thinking to yourself that I'm not making any sense, because just above this I was talking about what seemed too strong about Dave's edits. However, the photo that is the subject of this thread is a little different in the sense that Dave has done the edits, so I can see it at a point where i was not the one making the judgements during editing. There is no way I would have ever come anywhere near the strength of his edits, were I starting from the raw file. So the fears I have are more relevant to edits which I will be doing in the future on my own, where I will have to make the call, and it will be foreign to me.