A guy at a star party told me my nebula shots looked like 'colorful soup'

I was showing off my Andromeda Galaxy photos from my backyard in Tucson. Proud of all the color I pulled out. This older guy, after looking for a minute, said 'It's pretty, but it looks like colorful soup. Where's the structure?' He was right. I was cranking saturation and clarity so high the fine dust lanes got mushy. I was going for 'wow' but lost the real shape of the thing. Now I process two versions. One for the pop, one where I pull back to show the actual gas clouds. It's a better balance. Keeps it real. Does anyone else fight the urge to over-process just to make an image stand out online?

3 comments

3 Comments

wade8718d ago

Honestly, that soup comment hits home. It made me wonder if we're all editing for tiny phone screens now. You need that insane pop just to get a thumb to stop scrolling past a sea of other images. The real shape of a nebula gets lost because it's subtle, and subtle doesn't grab attention in a feed. My own Orion shots looked way more 'real' on my monitor, but when I posted them they just looked flat next to the super bright ones. So I get the push and pull. It's editing for the algorithm versus editing for the actual object.

seth_singh208d ago

Man, you nailed it. That's exactly the problem. I worked so hard to keep my last image looking natural on my big screen, and then it just disappears on a phone. It feels like you have to choose between what's true to the data and what gets seen. Really bums me out because the real beauty is in those quiet details, not just the loudest color.

jennifer8338d ago

My old laptop screen was so dim I had to edit everything with the brightness cranked up. I'd get it perfect, then open it on my phone and it was a washed out mess. @wade871 is right about the feed, you have to fight for every pixel of attention. But it makes me sad that the soft glow of a galaxy arm just gets crushed into black. I keep two versions now, one for my desktop and a boosted one to post. It feels like cheating but it's the only way the quiet parts get seen at all.