Less Is More When Editing Photos

One of the things I've learned at Camera Club is that it's very easy to overdo it when editing your photos in Photoshop and other photo editing software.

Believe me, as soon as your photo is displayed using a projector onto a MASSIVE wall, all the minor problems are exposed.  It's quite alarming how different you perceive your own work, once it's been blown up to that size.  So, it's quite common for photographers to try and enhance their photos using editing software like Photoshop and Paintshop Pro before submitting their photos for review.  The problem is that sometimes the editing can make the problem a lot worse.

Take editing your photo for sharpness for example; if your shot is even slightly on the soft side (in other words, not perfectly in focus), you get penalized.   So, it's advisable to always slightly sharpen your photo before submitting it for review (or printing).

The problem with sharpening, is that there's a fine line between sharpening the photo to enhance it and make it perfect, and then having a complete disaster and over-sharpening it. The other problem with sharpening is that people assume that all blurred photos can be saved by sharpening… and that's not the case… sometimes photos are just too blurred to be fixed.

As an example, here's a photo SOOC (straight out of camera).

And here's an example of the same photo over-sharpened. Now at first glance, you might think that this looks perfect.  It's perfectly in focus now, as all the lines are clear.  But look at the edge of the leaf, can you see the bright lines? That's a sure sign of over-sharpening, and it's such an easy mistake to make.  It makes the whole photo look quite garish. The other tell-tale sign is the background of the photo that's gone completely grainy and lost the softness in the original photo.

So, when you're sharpening a photo, and you start seeing white at the edges of the object in question or even worse, the person's face that you're trying to "fix," STOP… and undo what you've done.

Here's the same photo again.  This time, I only slightly sharpened the photo using Photoshop's Unsharp Mask tool. It only looks slightly different to the first photo, but the sharpening has made a difference to the quality of the photo.

Sometimes, no matter how much you sharpen the photo, it's just going to remain blurred and just accept that you need to redo that photo.

So, take a look at the photos that you've edited recently, and see whether you've made this mistake.  Then re-edit the photos, and then see whether "less is, in fact, more."

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Jeanette is a South African working mother of 2 very busy boys. She's just started a photographic business (in addition to working full-time), and you can see her work on her blog… Photography by Jeanette.

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