By Mars   •   June 2, 2020

Well who are you? The peacock or the mole? Creativity is a great thing, weather to capture the emotion of a piece of work or to push new boundaries and styles. It's hard to tell someone to stop. Or is it?

Being a framer we see so many types of work. From photographic and watercolour to acrylic and fabric so it's fair to say, we've seen our fair share but we would never say to anyone something is too creative. But now and again we can see that something has been over worked to such a point that the work has lost it's soul. Let's look at photography as an example.

Keep It Simple

The photo of this mug (as I'm sat here looking at it), has a lot of texture, colour tones and character, so that's my subject and that's what I want to capture. Looking at the original image (fresh from the phone camera) it's a little flat and doesn't really pull in the detail as I wanted. So let's drop it into Adobe Lightroom.

For a quick edit and knowing what I wanted, the result isn't too bad. Sure I could spend a lot more time on it but really the detail has been slightly enhanced and the tones are more realistic to what I can actually see. Simple. BUT lets get overly creative for the sake of this blog.

The tones and clarity have been pushed too the extremes the colour has been over saturated which has resulted in the finer details becoming so much more fuzzy. Let's be honest. It's pretty nasty, unrealistic and nothing that I wanted to capture.

But that's just me. Over doing clearly isn't my style but it's easily done.

Like a Sandwich?

Yes. You can be too creative but it's a fine line. If it's something you specialise in and want to push, then we're not going to stand in your way. It's like making an amazing sandwich, your gut (in more ways then one) tell's you that's it – stop!! but you keep adding to it and adding to it and adding so much so you can't actually eat it just admire your work but stay hungry.

Bottom line. Don't always be the greedy chef.