> Having studied graphics and signal processing for a few years in graduate school before that job, I thought I would be good at seeing the differences, and I w

> Having studied graphics and signal processing for a few years in graduate school before that job, I thought I would be good at seeing the differences, and I was a bit shocked how good they were at it, and how not that good I was. :) IMO the best place to learn to see these distinctions is in careful photo printing (of the type where you spend >30m per image, and where “printing” here is being used in an old-school sense of “all of the manual steps to take a raw image from the camera and turn it into printed output”). Spend a few months doing that for a few hours per week and your ability to see artifacts, textural details, fine differences in amount of edge contrast, etc. will shoot up. (Obviously the folks who spend 30 years on this are even better.) Studying signal processing, optics, psychophysics, etc. is also useful for understanding what you are noticing, but it isn’t seeing practice.