Looking at top photos I realized that correct digital negative processing is only 50% if not less of a successful image rendering.
A great share of the rest of the work is taken by aligning the image with human perception to make it more pleasant for a human eye. This comes along with artistism of the production that makes a photo distinguishable among many others alike.
Please, share a recommendation of a book, an article or a whatever else where we could read more on peculiarities of human perception and techniques of artistic rendering of an image. I, mostly, shoot landscapes, but the genre is not important, if you know a refined subject-specific material.
Thanks and this thread may be a good place to share any relevant reads you have read or perceive as such.
Two observations (not part of the above overview):
Because the eyes adapt so quickly to what’s on the screen, long periods of editing tend to produce overly saturated images with crushed shadows and highlights - why? our eyes keep adapting to the already added contrast and saturation, so we add more. One solution is to take a lot of visual breaks and go “recalibrate” the eyeballs by staring out a window or at least at something other than what’s on the screen.
A related problem is in our perception of contrast vs our field of view. Look at an image up close, from the usual viewing distance while editing, and you can see localized micro-contrast, and you want to add more such contrast, and it might look really, really good to keep adding more local contrast. But looking at the same image from across the room, often it just looks spotted and busy. From a distance the micro-contrast disappears into blobs of dark or light that produce an entirely different “perceived composition” than what you see when viewing the image up close while editing. One solution is to periodically get up from the computer and view the image from 10 or 15 feet away.