Why do people living near an airport say they no longer hear the planes flying overhead? Why don’t people working in a sodium-vapour-lit factory notice the orange-coloured lighting? Have you noticed that if you always eat the same flavour of ice cream, you enjoy it less? Why aren’t garbage collectors bothered by the smell?

This psychological effect is called habituation. It happens because your senses naturally adapt to what’s around you.

When you spend a long period of time editing photos, habituation means your eyes will start to adapt to the images in front of you. You’ll lose your point of reference for editing. For examples: you can’t tell if skin tones are too warm or too cold; poorly white-balanced photos may start to look okay; you can’t tell if an adjustment is making the image better or worse; you can’t decide how much Unsharp Mask to use.

This is why, when doing large editing jobs, I’ll make one pass at post-processing the images and then leave the pictures for a day or two before going back to complete the work. As much as possible, I’ll edit photos about 80% of the way and then finish them another day with fresh eyes.

Similarly, after a long day of shooting business headshots, if time permits, I’ll make the proof selections on the following day. I find the extra day allows me to view the raw images more objectively. A long day of shooting anything can really tire your eyes and dull your editing judgment.

Near where I lived, there was once a Dad’s cookie factory located directly across the street from a Bick’s Pickle factory. When passing through the area, depending on wind direction, you could smell either the sweet scent of cookies or the odour of pickles. Some days, you could smell both at the same time ;-)

Having spoken with some of the employees at each company, the workers said they didn’t notice any smells inside their own factory. I thought this was probably good for the pickle people but not so much for the cookie makers.