North Bay, Fog and Clouds
We’ve all seen those photographs. Over sharpened, over saturated and over just about everythinged; photographs that actually hurt your eyes when you look at them. Sometimes people get carried away and just pummel their pixels far more than necessary. We cringe and move along. A short public service announcement: If your photograph looks like you’ve put a huge amount of effort into it, you probably have put too much into it.
I will not wax poetic about the good old days (the "good old days" never were. Has anything in photographic technology become worse?) because the consequences of a failed negative were pretty harsh; we threw the offending negative in the trash and then picked up our camera with a firm resolve not to make the same mistake again. If we wanted to fix a bad negative, we could have intensified, reduced, or if the negative was big enough and the changes small enough we could have used retouching pencils. If the negative was worthy of printing we could have bleached or intensified a print. Exacto knives could be used to remove dark spots by scraping away the emulsion. And then there was spot tone to remove the white spots on your prints. I was amazed to find that spot tone is still available. Crude, of course, but it was all we had. Until now.
With all the digital tools available to photographers today, there is the temptation to go too far to salvage an image that should not see the light of day. When it comes to perfecting your images, less is better.
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