These are the times when you need a good photo editor looking over your shoulder, like a veteran surgeon at the E.R.:
"Doctor, you've done all you can. There's nothing else we can do. Call it."
"You call it!"
I do this way too often; invariably after an hour in Photoshop I realize the only thing I could have done was to take it correctly in the first place. Here are a few examples from recent history.
This is just an extreme crop of a vertical shot, at night, in the dark, at high-ISO. It's not an abomination, but the quality suffers from the crop, and I think its actually a bit over-exposed - isolating the highlights in the globes turns the rest of the scene black and we'd still get the light on the guy's face.
"Doctor, you've done all you can. There's nothing else we can do. Call it."
"You call it!"
I do this way too often; invariably after an hour in Photoshop I realize the only thing I could have done was to take it correctly in the first place. Here are a few examples from recent history.


