a little discussion on editing

i am almost never satisfied.

i consider this shot to be one of the best i have ever done, but there has always been things about the original edit that bothered me, certain elements that i thought i could improve on.

i thought i had worked it to death the first time around, and i was happy with the way it stood for, well, months now. i showed it to a really good friend of mine, for the first time, the other day, and he immediately pointed out one of the things that has always bothered me. of course that drove me nuts. so yesterday i pulled up the raw image and completely re-edited it all over again.

this is the new complete:



now look at where it was before

i was actually happy with the old original edit, but compared to the new version it looks pretty weak? huh. funny what a fresh look at something can bring out. this is the exact same image, i swear to god.



i couldn't believe it myself, until i saw the two together, how much of a difference there was between the first edit and the second. in some ways, i'm sure, i was paying closer attention to the things that i knew bothered me the first time around. also, i'm sure that i have just gotten a little better at what i do, and how i do it, in the past few months. thats to be expected with anything that you do all day everyday, right?

i think that you can't really understand the whole process until you see the actual starting point, so i decided to do something i never do, show you what the shot looked like straight out of the camera:



now don't take this as an outright example of everything i do. this is a pretty extreem version of editing for me. a lot of what i do is very close to finished when i shoot it, this one, well, this one took a little more work, but i think it was worth it in the finished result.

i think that this will be remembered as one of the best images of my carreer. so maybe a peek behind the curtain might just raise it's value a little bit.