Infamous Examples of Really Bad Edits You Could Do to Your Pictures

Post-processing can be a great tool to improve your photography, whether you do it step-by-step, use Photoshop actions, Lightroom presets or any other product (or app!) for enhancing your images.

But when is retouching too much? The type and amount of editing you decide to do to your picture could be the difference between a “cool” and an “amazing” picture and one that is “too fake.”

Please note this little article doesn’t intend to offend anyone, as there are a lot of styles out there. Anyway, it is your art, so do whatever you want! Here are just some suggestions if you are just learning about photo editing and want to know how to approach it.

Above, you will find a really subtle example on how you can retouch the skin too much to the point that it looks unreal. It doesn’t stand out immediately, but there is something strange in the face, especially once you compare it to the original.

Skin is not flawless; it has some texture and some lines! Faces are not flat surfaces, so consider the light you use and the normal shadows it will create. You can fix some blemishes or skin marks here and there, soften the skin a little bit and brighten the eyes up as well, but try to keep it to a minimum, almost like there is no evidence of it.

A common mistake is to remove the normal shadows under the eyes or clear the facial lines absolutely. Over-smoothing the skin is another popular one, very much seen after crazy filters.

Some brightening up is okay, especially if you need to fix an exposure mistake in post-production. But don’t brighten the picture too much. This is far from looking good!

Watch out for blown-out patches of white, check your histogram and try to preserve the details (especially for skin).

In hand with this one, you might be tempted to add some contrast to your picture, and then add a little more, and a little more, and make it look so dramatic and intense. Stop! High contrast might work in some situations (especially with black and white), but in some cases where it is too much, it is simply unflattering to the skin, and it can blow up your picture!

It’s great to use editing tools to enhance your portraits. It really is! Sometimes, you can add life to an otherwise normal image, or you can even save an image!

The eyes are the center of the photo in a lot of cases. It’s where we are immediately drawn to and where we can read the sentiment.

There are many ways to intensify the spark and add a little boost of color to the eyes, and it’s a great tip to capture the viewer’s attention. However, as in previous examples, excessive editing might lead you to end up with unrealistic and unwanted results.

Remember, if you make your eyes look too blue, too green or way too bright, you can easily ruin the picture.

In relation to our previous point, there is also the issue of overdoing saturation.

Saturation refers to the colorfulness of a color. What this basically means is: If the color is green, how green is this green?

A lot of editing tools and applications will let you increase the saturation and, with it, the intensity and vivacity of your picture. In some cases, the filters will also add a glow to your picture, making it look like it came straight from a fantasy land!

Try to avoid such high levels of color, especially if your picture contains a lot of green, because it is so easy to tell it isn’t real and that you tried too hard.

Tip: Always check your monitor saturation levels, too! It might be incorrectly calibrated so you might end up with over-saturated pictures without even knowing it!

Oh, the fake blur is a very noble mistake!

It happens shortly after you get into photography, and then you try to emulate those amazing pictures where everything in the background is blurred out, except the main subject!

This instance is incredibly easy to spot, and in most cases, it is because how poorly done it is. In some cases, it might work while, in some other cases, it might be necessary, in which case you should make sure you spend some hours on it until it’s absolutely perfect. Also ensure that it makes sense, in contrast to the picture above. Since the catcher is at the same distance as the batter, he shouldn’t have been blurred out).

Or you can also learn how to do it in camera.

Once you learn to use the camera and the different manual modes, you can achieve this effect in-camera by using the right aperture and shutter-speed combination. And it will look awesome!

This is one of the most trendy bad kinds of editing , and, for some reason, it is still a trend. You might even have had a friend or client ask you for the effect where “everything is black and white except the roses.”

We sincerely hope you ran away from that, very far away.

Selective coloring has been even used in films, such as Sin City and Schindler’s List. But we would like to believe there was a reason and a big, symbolic undertone.