That time a forum mod told me my images were way too compressed and ruined my whole workflow

Back in 2018, I was posting photos from a camera I got secondhand on Craigslist up in Portland. This one moderator on a hobbyist board straight up said my images looked like 'melted plastic wrapped in static'. They were right though. I had been saving everything as a baseline JPEG at quality 60 to save space, thinking nobody would notice. Turns out that setting was actively destroying my highlights and making everything look flat. After they called me out, I switched to saving at quality 85 and started shooting in RAW. The difference was night and day. I still cringe thinking about how many decent shots I butchered before that. Has anyone else had a random piece of criticism totally change how you process your files?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade4713d ago

Oh man, I did the exact same thing with JPEG compression back in 2015 and someone finally told me my photos looked like they were from a flip phone. I bumped up to quality 85 and started saving as TIFFs for anything important and it completely fixed my colors and sharpness.

bencampbell13d ago

Tiff is the way, I never look back after making that switch myself.