Don't over-edit

Below is a picture that I took:

Below is the edited version of the picture above:

Below is the shown differences of the two pictures:

Below is a time-lapse of how I edited the picture with After Effects (no audio):

     Overall, you probably didn't see much difference until I pointed it out on the third picture. Over-editing is when you edit your picture, further than raising the brightness or compressing the resolution to a lower grade, and by adding unnecessary objects or overlays to your composition. As Nicole Woods states in her book, "some photographers are less concerned about composition, exposure and the quality of their images because they put their trust in their software to correct anything that went wrong" (Woods 85).  I thought that maybe the dust on the keyboard would go away, but in the end, I failed to remove the dust from the keyboard no matter how hard I tried. 

     She also states that pixels are also a determining factor of every picture taken digitally: "When you crop a photograph... you are... chopping off a lot of pixels from around edges of the photograph" (Woods 85). In my picture, the original resolution was 3888 by 2892 pixels at 4:3 aspect ratio. Not many TVs, phones or computer screens support 4:3, so I cropped it to make a nice fitting 16:9 aspect ratio at 1980 by 1080 pixels. This, however, caused the picture to lose 1908 vertical pixels and 1812 horizontal pixels to create a total of 3,457,296 pixels lost. To give you some perspective, the original picture had a total of 11,244,096 pixels. Essentially I ripped roughly 3/10ths of this picture off. 

     Another tip that Woods gave was to take the largest, pixel-wise, picture possible. "Because quality images take up more space on the card, people often to opt for somewhere in the middle and this is a huge mistake" (Woods 88). At 3888 by 2892 pixels, this is about half of the resolution I could've taken my picture at, 8K UHD or 7680 by 4320 pixels. This is where I compensated for a smaller size picture, data-wise, as she stated in that quote, and now it cannot be edited fully in near Raster range.

     Woods also says in her book that if you take good pictures, you don't need to edit them: "Of course you can use a professional software...  to improve your images, but imagine if your images became so good you didn't have to" (Woods 86). I chose this picture to prove her point, this picture is bad. Look at the first picture and find the farthest key. What? You can't see it? Well then look at the closest key, Hmm? You still can't see it? Well what can you see? Oh you can see the one or two really dusty keys in the middle? Possibly the worst part of the whole keyboard? I depended on my software to remove the dust and make the picture much better. 

   In the end, I believe that this over-edit I've conducted was not worth it. It took twelve minutes to make a slightly "better" picture were I had to explain the differences. By editing this picture I threw away 3/10ths of the picture away, tried to remove something that I couldn't, compensated for it's down-scaled size, and didn't even try to take a good picture by telling myself "After Effects will fix it."

     Do you think over-editing is worth the time?

     Woods, Nicole. Photography. Lexington: CreateSpace, 2015. Print.