Why I stopped trying to fix every single photo detail by hand

Staring at the screen for hours just to remove a stray wire

I remember sitting there for three hours last Tuesday, zoomed in at 400% on a photo of a café I visited in Hannam-dong. I was trying to remove a stray electrical wire that kept cutting across the top left corner of the frame. It’s one of those things you don’t notice when you take the photo, but once you start editing, it becomes the only thing you can look at. I was using Photoshop, or at least my version of it, moving pixel by pixel with the patch tool. It felt like I was back in college doing those long nights of lab reports. I kept telling myself that this kind of manual cleanup was just part of the process if I wanted the output to look clean, but honestly, by the end of it, my eyes were burning. I looked at the clock and realized I had spent more time fixing that one tiny distraction than I had actually spent taking the photos that day.

The shift toward easier, albeit imperfect, solutions

There is this expectation that you have to use the industry-standard software to get anything done, but honestly, the barrier to entry feels exhausting sometimes. I’ve started playing around with those AI-based background removal apps on my phone, even though they aren’t perfect. They usually cost about 5,000 to 10,000 won for a monthly subscription if you want to get rid of the watermarks, which honestly feels like a bargain compared to the cost of a full Adobe suite subscription. Sometimes these apps leave weird, fuzzy edges around the hair or the leaves of a plant, but for the stuff I’m posting online, it’s mostly good enough. It feels a bit like cheating, or at least like I’m cutting corners, but I think I’ve reached a point where I care more about getting the job done than hitting some arbitrary professional standard.

Managing layers and the weight of high-resolution files

I once tried to put together a simple portfolio using a bunch of layered Photoshop files I had saved over the last year. I thought I could just drag them into an InDesign layout and export it to PDF for printing, but the file size was absolutely massive. I remember sitting in front of my computer, which is a fairly decent machine, and watching the loading bar crawl across the screen like it was in slow motion. Each file was hitting nearly 2GB because I had kept all the adjustment layers and masks active. I should have flattened them earlier, but I was always afraid I’d need to tweak a specific color grade later on. It’s that constant loop of ‘what if I need to change this later’ that makes every project take twice as long as it should. Dealing with the digital storage space and the time it takes to render those files has become a recurring annoyance that I still haven’t found a perfect fix for.

The gap between artistic vision and technical overhead

I look at some of the artists I follow who describe their process as layering dozens of photos into a single massive data set, and I just wonder how they keep their sanity. They talk about capturing every small piece of information, not missing a single detail, and creating these complex works that feel almost like painting with pixels. It sounds beautiful, but when I try to emulate even a fraction of that, I end up just feeling buried in menus and sub-menus. I spent all of last weekend trying to automate the ‘nuki’ process—that’s just the local term for removing the background—on a series of product shots. I thought if I could just write a script or find a plugin that handled it, I could free up my time for something more creative. But I spent more time trying to set up the automation than I would have if I had just done it manually. I guess the technical overhead is just part of the deal, even if I still haven’t figured out how to make it feel less like a chore.

Remaining uncertainties about my workflow

I’m still not sure if I should keep fighting with these heavy, complex files or if I should just lean into the quick, AI-assisted tools that are popping up everywhere. There’s a part of me that feels like if I’m not ‘doing the work’—the manual selection, the careful masking—then the end result isn’t really mine. But then, standing up from my chair with a stiff neck after an entire afternoon of clicking, that feeling starts to fade pretty quickly. Maybe there isn’t a right way to do this. Maybe I’m just supposed to find a level of messiness I can live with. I keep looking for that one magic tool or that perfect workflow that will just make everything click, but I suspect that’s just a way to distract myself from the fact that I just don’t like the tedious parts of editing that much.