Walking Away from an Image

I’m curious about this. Do you ever walk away from an image after a few minutes then come back to it to see if it looks alright?

Sometimes I find myself overtweaking an image post-process - so I force myself to take a break. Sometimes minutes or hours I will come back to it and it will look ‘off/incorrect.’

Do you guys experience the same thing? And if so, how do you normally go about solving this?

yep, i recognize that behaviour!

I’ve also seen people flip the image on the horizontal in photoshop because you often notice things that aren’t correct, and then flip it back..

Another thing I do is print out images, or send them to my home computer. Then go home and have a few beers, and critique them. It helps figure out what is wrong with it.

:slight_smile: I used to do that ages ago.. then I gradually lost the habit.

I don’t walk away from images very often, at least not as often as I do when modeling something which is quite detailed and complicated.

Do that all the time, and best thing is to sleep on it and look at it again the next day. I can be very happy with an image and then come back to it and think it’s crap and continue working on it. I also often look at the monitor from 1-2 meters away.

/Thomas

I do that a lot.
And sometimes I try to look outside from window, to paintings on wall, have coffee and look at people’s faces. And when back, sometimes I see that I messed the image ehehe.

I also look at image 1-2m away from monitor too. SOmehow I see image better that way. And sometimes I need to choose between 2 different versions and it becomes funny to go away from monitor-look-go near monitor and change image- and walk back again ehehe
I need a partner who can switch the images on my monitor when I am standing away or a remote :slight_smile:

A lot of image browser have a slide show feature, just put both images in a folder and let the show begin

My biggest problem is that I’m never statisfied with what I make.
When I’m working on something, I think it looks good, but the next day I think it sucks and this keeps repeating itself, causing me to eventually loose interest in the image.
That’s why I have quite alot of unfinished projects on my HD :S

I think it is a good habit to walk away and come back later to get a fresh perspective on an image. I also find showing it to someone else is really handy, because every time I show an image to someone who is not familiar with it I find that I very quickly spot my own mistakes. If it’s a client you are almost guaranteed to spot them about 1/2 a second before they do :slight_smile:

b

Squint

I find myself squinting at my images a lot. You can really tune into your focal point and see your lighting highlights well.