Comparing Your Edit to the Original with Fresh Eyes
Okay. Last time we talked about fixing that old scanned photo of my parents, and how I made it worse for about an hour before I made it better by doing almost nothing. That one's stuck with me. Today's lesson is kind of the tool that would've saved me that hour in the first place.
Here's the problem. Once you've been staring at an edit for ten minutes, you can't see it anymore. Your eyes adjust. You brightened something and it looked dramatic three sliders ago, and now it just looks normal, so you push it further. This is exactly how I ended up with a cedar board that looked like the surface of the sun. I couldn't see what I'd done because I hadn't stopped looking at it long enough to see it fresh.
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. You compare your edit to the original, side by side, with eyes that haven't been marinating in the photo for the last twenty minutes.
The actual steps
Most editing apps have a way to do this. Look for one of these:
- A button that says "before/after" or "compare"
- An icon of two overlapping squares
- A toggle you hold down that flips back to the original
If your app has none of that, here's the manual version: save your edited photo as a new file, pull up the original next to it (or in the previous photo in your camera roll), and look at both.
Do this:
- Look at the original first. Really look. What's actually happening in the photo, not what you remember happening.
- Now flip to your edit. What changed? Is it better, or is it just different?
- Ask specifically: did I fix a real problem, or did I fix a problem I only noticed because I was staring at pixels for ten minutes.
- If you can't tell anymore, that's your answer. Step away and come back in an hour. I know that's annoying advice when you want to be done, but it works every time and it costs you nothing but patience.
Honestly, the flip-back-and-forth is the whole trick. It literally takes five seconds and it catches almost everything. Oversaturated colors that looked "punchy" a minute ago suddenly look like a bag of Skittles. An exposure boost that felt subtle suddenly looks like you turned on every light in the garage.
Where I usually get caught
I'll be honest about where this trips me up, because it still does. It's early, I've got coffee, and I tell myself I'm "just cropping one thing." Debra actually caught me doing this one morning, sitting there at 5:40 before my walk, coffee already going cold, fiddling with a photo. She reminded me the cedar bench for the ward entryway was not going to build itself while I sat there nudging a crop line back and forth. I told her I was just cropping one thing.
I was not just cropping one thing. I was fifteen minutes into a rabbit hole and hadn't compared anything to anything, I was just moving sliders because moving sliders is satisfying at 5:40 in the morning with cold coffee. That's the state you're in when you need the compare tool most, because that's exactly when your eyes have stopped working right.
The opinion part
Most photos need less editing than people think they need. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it because it's the single biggest thing that separates an edit that looks intentional from one that looks like somebody discovered the sliders. When you compare your before and after and the after looks dramatically different, that's usually not a compliment to your editing. Restraint is what reads as somebody who knew what they were doing. A big obvious change usually reads as somebody who got excited.
So when you do the before/after flip, you're not just checking for mistakes. You're checking whether you did more than the photo needed.
A quick caution
If you're editing on a phone in bright sunlight, up the canyon or out on a walk or wherever, your screen brightness is fighting you and everything looks better than it is. Same with a laptop screen that's aged a little and gone a bit dim or blue-ish. Compare your edits somewhere with normal, boring indoor light if you can. Screens lie to you outdoors, and dry, bright Utah sun makes every photo look more vivid than it actually is on the file.
Before next time
Pick three photos you've already edited this course and do the compare flip on each one. If any of them make you go "oh, that's too much," fix it before we move on. No shame in it, that's the whole method. 😊