dfcredo Loc: Grand Rapids,Michigan

This was from several years ago in Ireland. I was shooting film and edited to a "paint like effect" without duplicating first. Now I shoot RAW digitally and always have an original to go back to. If you shoot jpeg....always duplicate BEFORE editing. Wish I had an original to play with again. Lesson learned.

sinatraman Loc: Vero Beach Florida, Earth,alpha quaudrant

good words of advice. I like the paint like effect on this shot for some reason the man reminds me of steve guttenberg from the police academy movies

Horseart Loc: Alabama

I learned that same lesson! I posted mine too in hopes of keeping others from making the same mistake. I like the way yours turned out. I just over sharpened mine and made it to noisy. I do my "painting" with a real brush and paints, but tend to over process photos.

jazzplayer

Whatever you did to it, I like it! - very painterly. Quite unfortunate that you can't try other treatments of the original, though. I thought I was finally cured of "oops!" file destruction, but I accidentally overwrote a jpeg just last night. ^S is just a little too easy to do without thinking.


H - You are not alone! Sometimes when I go back and look at pics I've posted on this site and elsewhere, I ask myself, "what was I thinking?!?" on my Photoshop work.
Overprocessing is really too easy to do (and seems quite common), and I think it's a good idea to limit the amount of time you spend processing any one photo, even if you need to come back and finish it later. The human eye is a funny thing, isn't it?
Sometimes I wish the designers of Photoshop had never added the "Shadow/Highlight" feature - currently the most widely overused tool in the box, I think...