Got roasted in a Reddit thread for a photo I took near Flagstaff

I posted this shot of the Milky Way I took from a pullout on Highway 89, north of Flagstaff, back in June. Thought it looked decent, decent sharpness on the stars, good foreground, the whole deal. Then some guy with 50k karma comments that my black point is totally crushed and the stars have weird color halos from processing. I went back and looked at the raw file and sure enough, he was right, I had cranked the clarity slider way too far in Lightroom and it made everything look fake. Felt like a clown for a day or two, but I actually learned how to stretch data properly after that. Now I process like I'm showing someone the image, not trying to impress them with punchy contrast. Has anyone else had a critique that totally changed their editing workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

spencer19921d ago

My buddy Dave went through the exact same thing. He posted a photo of the Grand Canyon at sunset and someone told him his highlights were completely blown out in the sky. Dave thought he was being cool making the sunset look super intense and dramatic, but the critique forced him to actually learn about histogram clipping. He spent a whole weekend watching tutorials on exposure blending and now his shots look way more natural. It's wild how one stranger on the internet can push you to get better.

knight.xena20d ago

The blown out sky thing is a trap almost everyone falls into. You think you're capturing what you saw but the camera just can't handle the dynamic range like your eyes can. I started using the histogram overlay on my camera screen and it was a game changer. Now I shoot bracketed exposures for any scene with bright sky and dark foreground. A quick merge in post fixes it right up.