When to quit working on an image.

While working on an image a few weeks ago I quit workiing on one after three days to produce the Web

and print images to a point I was more or less satisfied. While working on some new black and white

images, I realized there is a point where you're past the optimium return and are on the side of

diminishing returns, and most, but not all, of any improvements are either judgement calls or incidental,

and don't really improve the overall image. So, I got to thinking when and where to draw the line and leave

an image, if only for a while to clear the mind and revisit it later. Where do you draw the line and do you

have internal (mental fatique or sensory overload) or external (tiime) criteria to define when to stop?

That's a hard one to define. Painters have been known to be afflicted with this kind of

obsessiveness too, as have certain film directors -Stanley Kubrick for example. And Irving

Penn has been known to work on a single visually simple still life setup for days. So you are

in good company. the digital darkroom makes it easier to indulge it than chemical darkrooms

did, certainly more comfortable.

 

To a certain degree " you have to adopt a "ragged but right" (tip of the hat to Waylon and

Willie) philosophy. All I can say is that the enemy of good enough is the mindless pursuit of

technical perfection. Stopping for a long lunch or a couple of days is a good idea.

What does "working on an image" refer to, Scott?

 

1) Recomposing, revisiting a scene over and over, as Yussef Karsh did with the portraits of Stravinsky, with a few rolls of film?

 

Or: 2) photoshopping the dickens out of one capture?

 

I would say yes to 1): go back and see more, capture more as you feel new insights.

 

Re 2): I would say: stop working on an image before you even start ps. Just retake it in better light, composition, ...

 

I.e., go back to 1) as often as necessary, maybe for your whole remaining life. And never even enter the ps digital manipulation, digital illustration game.

 

A bit of sharpening etc is ok. But to work on an image that you did not capture right, what a waste of time and effort.

 

My 2 cents of anti-Adobe, I am afraid.

uh....yes

Amen to Ellis!

 

Scott, I have found myself doing the same thinking as you, as I am still learning the how and whys, recently I have adopted the more hands off approach, I simply watch the histogram while making adjustments, do the simplest of adjustments watching to make sure that I don't clip then stop once I have applied the basics, save to folder then just leave it alone for awhile, usually I have found that once I come back to that picture for another look, I'M satisfied with it!

 

Like Doctor Phil says "The more we complicate things, the more complicated they become"

 

Ken.

Frank,

 

Let's say you were working in a photochemical darkroom. Your standards rule out: dust

spotting , contrast adjustment (by filtration, changes in paper, changes in developer (film

or print); dodging and burning, selective bleaching, toning and intensification, much less

out and out retouching.

 

All things being equal (And when does that ever happen?) I would much rather get it right

when shooting.

 

Revisiting a subject however is a great idea. I wish more photographers did it.

<<I would say: stop working on an image before you even start ps.>>

 

You should also tell anyone who has a wet darkroom set up at home to never tone, burn, dodge, or change the development of, their prints.

 

<<My 2 cents of anti-Adobe, I am afraid.>>

 

Yes, ignorance does lead directly to fear.

"A bit of sharpening etc is ok. But to work on an image that you did not capture right, what a waste of time and effort."

 

"My 2 cents of anti-Adobe, I am afraid."

 

Working with the above.

 

In your mind, you "had" an image, based upon your known skill sets, at the time the shutter was depressed. Work the image, to the point of the image you had in your minds eye, before tripping the shutter.

 

Anything past that point, to me, is gratuitous. That is not necessarily a bad thing but are you creating the image in front of you or is your artistic vision that which you find in the recesses of cyberspace; graphic arts?

 

Myself, I love to push things in PS but I'm pushing to develop the image I had in my minds eye at the time of shutter trip.

 

Your call.

If you find yourself wondering that while working on an image, then that is the moment to step away and do something else.

Stop when you're done. Save several copies as a progression of the work, and you can re-edit from somewhere in the middle later. I find that many images have multiple 'complete' forms... and I love PS. It's done when you're satisfied with it.

"Painters have been known.." In my experience, growing up in a family of artists (I am the black sheep--the only critic in the family), almost all painters suffer from the inability to stop reworking the darn thing until they go past the optimum (and defining that, of course, is the rub) point.

The only solution is to treat "saving the image" it like voting in Chicago-do it early and often. If you save different stages nowadays, at least you or your local critic can go back to what it was before you ruined it. With a watercolor or an oil painting, you didn't have that option.

I did an A-#level in Fine art (painintg) at college and my tutor gave a very useful piece of advice:<BR><BR><b>

"Paint the basics first then add detail in bits and pieces once you have got to the highlights leave it and work on something else. Come back in an hour or so and look at it like you have never seen it before, then you will know what needs to be done."<BR><BR></b>

To apply thins to photography is simple. Open the image up, do the basics...levels curves ect and go away for a while coming back and looking at it like you have never seen it before then decide on what to do.

My process hasn't changed much since I was bulk-loading Tri-X and working in my basement darkroom. Much of the time I have a deadline and so the "first-pass" of processing is usually fairly rapid. I usually don't bother with layers or the like in PS and just apply color-temperature adjustment, levels/curves, saturation, cropping, and some sharpening. There's a certain freedom in knowing "it just has to be good enough".

 

After the first pass of processing, I'll usually have a pretty good idea of which shots are the real keepers (i.e. my personal favorites). I'll often come back to them a number of times and often start from the original RAW file and reprocess completely "from scratch". Sometimes I'm motivated by hearing/reading about some new technique that I think might work with the image, and sometimes the I'll see the shot on my wall or screen-saver and imagine a different way to use it.

 

In one sense the switch to digital format has helped, because it's more likely that I'll catch a glimpse of an old shot because there are ways to show large collections of photos (ex. my screen saver) which don't use wall-space or even print paper. The other benefit of digital is the low "barrier to entry" for reworking a shot. It's very easy to try something out; often I stop within minutes of starting because it's clear that whatever I'm doing is just not working. In the darkroom days, I tended to be a bit more conservative because it just too much trouble to make "just one print".

 

Sometimes I'll re-shoot a particular scene, but honestly most of my photos are of fleeting moments (hard to revisit a shot of a sailboat taken hanging out the door of a helicopter...). I _do_ regularly take what I like (or don't like) about a particular shot and try to use that observation the next time I'm in a similar situation, but I think that's just simply part learning and improving.

 

Cheers,

 

Geoff S.

"I would say: stop working on an image before you even start ps. Just retake it in better light, composition"

"All things being equal (And when does that ever happen?) I would much rather get it right when shooting"

"A bit of sharpening etc is ok. But to work on an image that you did not capture right, what a waste of time and effort".

 

This advise from the thread is not from ignorance, but from wisdom. I agree with Frank, Ellis, and Rob.

To Ellis:

 

I said " .. A bit of sharpening etc is ok." I did not specify the etc, did I. Sorry.

 

Of course all of the etc you mentiuoned above " ... dust spotting , contrast adjustment (by filtration, changes in paper, changes in developer (film or print); dodging and burning, selective bleaching, toning and intensification, much less out and out retouching..." ARE NOT RULED OUT. Of course if the print shows some dust specs you may cover that up etc etc. Naturally.

 

What I am afraid of is the zillions of manipulated digital illustrations with multiple ducks all in a row in the foggy lake.

 

A kind of second hand photography and cloning kitsch with fake halos, unreal colors, make belief that is passed off as paiting with light, when it is painted with ps's paintbrush tool. And that is what I do not like or care about. That is where ps starts becoming bad and trite, Scott.

 

My 3 cents worth now. Good luck to learn when to say no to new found freedoms of nonsensical modifications.

"What I am afraid of is the zillions of manipulated digital illustrations with multiple ducks

all in a row in the foggy lake."

 

It is pretty amazing isn't it?

 

You would think that if folks were stuck in a cubicle all day and in front of a computer,

that this would be the last thing they would want to do, to just keep reeling in the

unreality of computer life. I remember hearing years ago how folks loved the craft of

photography because it was an escape from the dull jobs they had and was a great excuse

to get out and explore the world around them.

 

But now, there is so much of this overboard computer art on this site it is just flat out

insane. We all want and expect different things out of photography, but this stuff takes the

cake.

 

Fortunately, there is a real world out there that loves to see real photography. I have a

darkroom as well and realize the manipulation arguments have merit, but the amount of

photoshop work on here is flat out gross.

 

I don't think Photo.net is the best place to express your self if you are a non-composite

type. Don't get me wrong, it is still a great site, but I no longer recommend it to my

workshop participants or friends due to the amount of graphic art that dominates it.

Scott, for me, I know I have worked the image enough when my gut tells me: "You got it,

stop shooting".

All photoshop is to me is a lab, a necessary evil in which I get the image I saw in reality

onto print, an email, to a client or otherwise.

 

I personally love the challenge of getting it right in the field, when the wind is blowing, the

rain is falling, the sun is in my eyes. For me, there is no greater magic than that of the real

world in front of me...:-).

 

Of course, your milage and needs may vary...

I think I'd like to know more about your process in working with images.

 

Do you start with an idea (mental picture) of what the final image should look like and work towards that?

 

Or, is your process more of an ad hoc iterative way of working where you form the idea of what you want as you work using the visual feeback to prompt decisions?

 

Do you make full size test images and hang them up and evaluate them?

 

Do you set a self imposed deadline for when the work must be finished or do you have no deadline and just work with the image at whatever pace is comfortable until it's finished?

 

For me personally, I don't approach an image with a deadline in mind. Each image needs the amount of work it takes to get it right. That might be two hours or a year...

 

But, what is important to me is to get inside the image and live in it to learn all of its nuances...and then start figuring out how to better unify and present the different aspects of the image.

Before digital came along, the time-proven advice was, as much as possible get it right, whilst you are taking the shot. This was especially true for transparencies were what you shot was what you got! Digital makes it more tempting to try to retouch, but the more time passes the more I believe that apart from adjusting light levels/contrast and maybe one or two other minor corrections the old advice still holds true.

"Before digital came along, the time-proven advice was, as much as possible get it right, whilst you are taking the shot. This was especially true for transparencies were what you shot was what you got! Digital makes it more tempting to try to retouch, but the more time passes the more I believe that apart from adjusting light levels/contrast and maybe one or two other minor corrections the old advice still holds true."

 

Then you've apparently never visualized an image and then worked in the darkroom until you got what you visualized. Digital / darkroom doesn't matter - either is just a tool to get the end image - and you work on the image until it's right.

 

The pedantic mantra that's constantly trumpeted about fixing things in PS only reinforces my belief that the people making the statements have little, if any darkroom experience, little familiarity with the history of photography, and a LOT of opinions (and little experience) with PS.

"It is pretty amazing isn't it?

 

You would think that if folks were stuck in a cubicle all day and in front of a computer, that this would be the last thing they would want to do, to just keep reeling in the unreality of computer life. I remember hearing years ago how folks loved the craft of photography because it was an escape from the dull jobs they had and was a great excuse to get out and explore the world around them."

 

I guess I just don't get the comment - unless, of course you view photography like a round of golf - a pleasant diversion.

 

You've also seemed to have conflated two aspects into one...exposing the image and printing the image.

 

I don't know about you, but working in a darkroom is really no more exciting than working on a computer - they are just different means to the same end - a printed image.

 

I understand the junior scientist types who never took an organic chemistry class and think splashing paper or film through wet liquids is the thrill of a lifetime - and that's fine for entertainment purposes - but it's hardly any more creative than mousing your way through an image on a computer...is it?

You don't specify your process. For that matter you don't specify whether the image is digitized film capture or digital capture, or its intended output.

 

For digital capture I divide the process into two steps that fit my photography. The first is to develop the raw capture. Analogizing to film, I've made the capture at a certain sensitivity, but I have not yet determined which emulsion I want to use. "Raw conversion" I think of as applying a characteristic curve to the image. Those results that remind me why I raised the viewfinder to my eye and released the shutter in the first place are the "keepers".

 

So, I am satisfied. I am done. There they are on my virtual light table and in my virtual loupe, and on my virtual projector.

 

The devil enters this paradise when I need to output to a device. There's where the long and hard work can come in. The only way to know if you are done is to test the output.

 

--

 

Don E

Images tend to prioritize themselves, for me. I stop going back to yesterday's, when today's looks better (for a multitude of reasons). Also consider that editions have their own place in your artistic evolution. I frequently rework an old image when I recognize I could do it better, with improved skills or improved tools... t <p>(reworking image files is what you can do when you're so old you can't lift your camera anymore. Stay fresh now.)

<p>I'm sorry if I didn't clarify my thoughts sufficiently, and I'm still reading through the

replies. My thought was with the digital image once you import it into PS. I only bought my

computer system last spring and started scanning slides and processing images. And in

December bought a digital camera, so I have that workflow to learn too.

 

<p>Anyway, the image that got me to thinking about this is <a href="http://

www.wsrphoto.com/philosophy.html">here</a> trying to get the print to match what I

wanted. And I'll be learning that work for a long time.

 

<p>I started with jpg files with the new camera until I got used to it (smaller files to take

lots of them), and am moving to raw and jpg files. I was looking at one which I also shot in

4x5 to compare later and couldn't find much that I wanted to change (second image <a

href="http://www.wsrphoto.com/lfblog15.html">here</a> - the garbage bag which was

there at the time was used for reference with and removed for the 4x5 shot).

 

<p>While looking at the raw file I can see lots to change to learn and play, but little to see

worth changing at this time. I know everyone would have their own take on it, if not "Why

waste the time with that image." My philosophy is try to capture what I see, so if it does

that, I'm happy with the image.

 

<p>Again, thanks. Lots to read and ponder learning a workflow.

When do you stop kissing?