You have finished the retouching. The brief is followed. The technical corrections are done. The image is clean, balanced, and consistent with the rest of the series. The client is happy with the result.
But when you look at the image, something still feels slightly wrong.
You cannot point to a specific mistake. There is no obvious technical problem to fix. You just have the feeling that the image is not completely resolved.
What do you do?
A. Keep working until you understand what is bothering you.
B. Stop. If there is no identifiable problem, the image is finished.
C. Step away from the image and look at it again later with fresh eyes.
D. Ask another experienced person for an opinion.
B. Stop. If there is no identifiable problem, the image is finished.
C. Step away from the image and look at it again later with fresh eyes.
D. Ask another experienced person for an opinion.
My take
I would choose C - step away and come back to it later.
If something feels off but I can’t explain what it is, I usually don’t want to keep making changes just for the sake of doing something.
A little distance often makes the problem much clearer. Sometimes I come back and immediately see what was bothering me. And sometimes I realize there wasn’t really a problem at all - I had simply been looking at the image for too long.
That second possibility is just as important.