Easy

 

Yesterday I yet again laid out a series of my photographs edited with a special effects software I'm enamored of. 

This kind of thing:

This picture looks a little like an illustration. But yesterday the pictures all looked like watercolor paintings, so I joked about them being real watercolor paintings. The joke being that they were all watercolor paintings that took me two minutes to make, because all I did was select a particular editing effect to get the pictures to look like they did.

And that's fair enough.

None of it takes very long.

In a way.

You just take a hundred pictures.

You sort through them, deleting as many as you can.

Then you go in and edit; adjust the color, the contrast, the exposure. You sharpen it. You experiment.

Then you stash a bunch of them away in folders and try and delete a few more.

You try a few more things with the few you have left.

You do a few more edits until you have one of them you really like.

Maybe you use it, maybe you don't. You set it aside.

Then you search for months for a photo software that does things you picture might be possible, but that you can't do on your own.

Finally you find the very thing! It's a miracle. It's super exciting.

You buy it up.

You pull out your picture and you run it through 50 different filters until you find the one that really works for what it is.

Then you edit it some more in relation to that.

And that really is that. See above.

And the weird thing is that it genuinely, when it works, feels like it was incredibly easy.

But I guess we all know:

Nothing easy comes without effort.