I think I know the hardest thing about photography… (At least for me)
It’s judging my own work. I’ve been a print competition judge at a national and regional level. I’ve done image critiques in paid workshops and online. I’ve judged more than 50 online photo contests. When I am looking at YOUR work, I am usually quite certain which of your images is strongest, and which need help.
When it comes to MY work? Not so much.
Copyright Scott Bourne
I’ll give you a little backstory. While I personally am not interested in what process you use to get your photos, I am VERY interested in the final result. While there are lots of “Photoshop Gurus” out there who think they have been appointed to decide what’s right and wrong about post processing a photograph, I am NOT one of those people.
But…
When it comes to my own work, I prefer to stick as close to the image I captured in the camera as possible. It’s not a religion with me, but it’s something I just prefer. I am not even sure why. I think it boils down to the fact that I’d just rather have my finger on a shutter button than a mouse button.
Copyright Scott Bourne
So back to my story – since I tend to leave my photos pretty much as they came out of the camera, I sometimes end up with images that are somewhere between 80-90% as good as they COULD be. Part of the reason is the aforementioned “get it from the camera approach” that I use, and the other reason is – I simply can’t judge my own work.
It’s SOOOOO wild. I can tell if YOUR photo is underexposed, but I can’t always tell if MY photo is underexposed. I think there must be some kind of “ism” that describes people like me, because I know I am not the only one with this problem.
It wasn’t until I started using the Perfectly Clear plug-in for Photoshop that I started to figure all this out.
The one-button correction might seem cheesy to those of you who consider yourselves to be Photoshop gods, but it’s not – cheesy that is. It’s based on a whole lot of science and it’s so spot on that it’s used on 30 million (yep MILLION) images a day at the big national labs that do printing for the average consumer. A number of very large processing labs have licensed Perfectly Clear so they can just automatically correct the millions of images they print every day. With the plug-in I can do that myself. And that’s exactly what I am doing.
My current workflow with Perfectly Clear involves moving my portfolio images into the plug-in and selecting a default level of automatic correction to be applied (via a custom preset I made using the program.) Then I compare the corrected version with the version that sits in my portfolio.
Copyright Scott Bourne
I am a little ashamed to admit that in about half the cases where I’ve done this, I’ve seen an improvement to the image. This is particularly perplexing because MANY of these images have been sold, licensed or published. Yet they could have been better. Now I am not saying the difference is staggering. Most of the time it is a minor difference, but I can SEE it and it’s very cool.
Taking an old image and revitalizing it by running through Perfectly Clear has taught me that while I cannot count on my own tired, old eyes to see my own images clearly, the plug-in doesn’t have that problem.
So now my workflow is pretty simple. I load up my images, pick my favorites to keep for publication, send the rest to archive and then run each of the keepers through Perfectly Clear. I can then trust that the exposure, clarity, vibrancy, depth, color, sharpness and noise levels are all where they are supposed to be.
Copyright Scott Bourne
If you’re like me, try this trick. Take a dozen of your favorite older photographs and load them into Perfectly Clear. Do it on a layer in Photoshop so you can quickly toggle (at full resolution/full screen) the difference between the before and after shot. I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out that your favorite picture just got better.
And don’t feel bad if you find out that your images needed a little more help than you realized. I had the opposite reaction. I was thrilled to see that my images could be improved so easily and quickly. Give it a shot.
(And yes Perfectly Clear sponsors Photofocus – what you can’t know is that both Rich and I have been using this plug-in for more than a year before we met the nice folks at Athentech.)
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Filed under: Photography Tagged: critiques, editing, Perfectly Clear, Scott Bourne 
