Yep, you stop when it’s not noticeable to anyone other than you.

Set a time limit for yourself.

E.g. “I will only work on this shot for 10 minutes, and then I will not even look at it for at least an hour”.

When you come back to it in an hour youll either immediately know what areas could use a little more touch or you will be happy with it. If you do feel it needs a little more work, give yourself a 5 minute time limit for the touch ups… then dont look at it for another hour.

This method of constantly limiting your time and forcing yourself to wait and to do anything with the edits will condition you to feel the full weight of the amount of time wasted on needless fine tune editing, and force you to accept/hone your editing technique in the first 10 minute session for no other reason than the desire to not want to wait an hour to come back to it later.

I.e. Its much more inconvenient to have to wait an hour to come back to finish something up than it is to sit there and lose an hour working on one shot. Youll eventually get tired of the inconvenience and learn to accept your edits for what you can produce in a 10 minute or less period of time.

When the client’s happy.

I’m an amateur, I don’t do much architecture photography and I don’t have clients so take it with a grain of sail, but I edit when there’s a purpose i.e.

• I almost always adjust highlights and shadows.

• I do a white balance test, sometimes pics are better if they’re white balanced but sometimes the “feel” is better if left alone. I keep the light red/purple etc. if it’s concert photography.

• Noise reduction if ISO was high.

• Maybe a crop.

• HSL only if I have a goal in mind. Maybe someone looks really cool in a photo and I want to give it a film look. Maybe I’m inspired to make the yellows pop. And then I’m done.

Otherwise, I’m just playing with settings.

Get it RIGHT BEFORE you press the shutter release…I hate when people say “I’ll fix it in post”

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Decide what level of quality your customer will be satisfied with and deliver to that. The picture needs to be good enough for them, not perfect.

Do yourself a test. Process a picture less than you’d normally do and deliver it. Don’t say anything about it, do not call attention to what you’ve done differently. If they say nothing, they likely haven’t noticed. If they do, then you know what they are paying attention to.

Is one of y’all photographers is available for an musician artist

Depends!

I have a rule with art photography, wherein I don’t allow too many layers without flattening the image. Taught me to learn when enough was enough and to stop second guessing myself.

That said, for my professional work I did have to figure out how much was “enough”. And indeed, sometimes small things get noticed. Something I like to do on airplanes is mark up fashion magazines with a sharpie, identifying the lighting setups and other technical aspects of photography. I’ve seen plenty of technical mistakes in large ad campaigns.

Really feel you there. I keep telling myself that nobody will ever zoom in on a picture at 300% but i struggle with over doing the 20% of work that takes 80% of the time…