A friend's offhand remark about my color grading made me question everything

So I was showing a piece I did for a local band poster to my buddy Dave last week. He's a photographer, not a digital artist at all. He looked at my work for like 10 seconds and said 'your shadows are too clean, it looks fake.' At first I was annoyed, but then I sat with it. He meant all my dark areas were pure black with no texture or noise. I've been relying on smooth gradients so long I forgot that real life has grit. I went back into the file and added some film grain and lifted the blacks a bit, and honestly it pops way more now. Has anyone else had a non-artist point out something obvious that you completely missed? What was it?

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona_hunt711d ago

Took a similar kick in the teeth when my cousin said my photos all looked 'too perfect'... he was right, everything was oversharpened and sterile. I cut the clarity slider way down and let some natural softness in, and suddenly people started asking what camera I used. Sometimes the people outside the bubble see the stuff we get blind to.

nathankim1d ago

...and honestly I'm going to push back on this one, @fiona_hunt71. I think the whole "too perfect" thing gets thrown around way too much these days. Just because a photo is sharp and clean doesn't mean it's sterile. Sometimes it means the photographer actually knows what they're doing with focus and light. I've seen plenty of "natural softness" that just looks like someone forgot to focus or didn't bother to learn the editing basics. There's a difference between adding a little warmth and dumbing everything down to hide flaws. And yeah, people might ask what camera you used when you soften things up, but that's usually because the image looks more like what their eye sees, not because it's better. If your cousin's opinion matters that much, fine, but I'd say trust your own eye first.