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.
While I am hesitant to wax poetic about the good old days (mostly because, in photography the good stuff has yet to happen), the consequences of a failed negative were pretty harsh; most of the time the only thing we could do then is throw the offending negative in the trash and then pick up our camera with a firm resolve not to make the same mistake again. We could intensify, reduce, or if the negative was big enough and the changes small enough retouching pencils were a possibility. If the negative was worthy of printing we could bleach or intensify 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 it 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.
