The Illustrative Effect
Chances are that if you're posting a photo because you think it's a good one, you're not going to do much more than make sure it's properly cropped and optimized. It's always fun to post a great photo.
However, if you're using a photo for illustration—to tell a story, to make a point, to annotate text—taking the photo is just the beginning. There's an amazing number of things you can do to a picture in order to convey mood or interest, to highlight a subject, or to convey a message. The photo becomes clay, and we become the sculptor.
Sharpen Me Up, Blur Me Down
Years ago when I was going to college, I worked for a photographer as a photo retoucher. In those days, photo retouching was actually done on the printed photograph using a variety of paints, chalk, and colored pencil.
When I was being trained in retouching, one of the first lessons I learned is that a slightly soft portrait could be blown up to a larger size, as long as the highlights in the eyes were sharp. We would use paintbrush and paint to "clarify" the highlight, which worked quite well. There were other approaches to sharpen a photo, using darkroom techniques. One was known as the Unsharp Mask—yeah, the one that most photo editors feature for digital sharpening.
In ancient pre-digital times, a positive transparency was made of a negative by exposing the negative on film rather than on paper. This new transparency was slightly blurred, and was sandwiched back with the original negative. The blurring ...