Illustration Judgment

Illustration judgment is the accumulated discernment that separates a filter recipe that works from one that merely runs. Every filter string produces some output; the question is whether that output serves the illustration and the reader, and the answer cannot be derived from any specification. It is learned through looking — at many illustrations, across many themes, in many viewing contexts — and through the discipline of accepting that a recipe's apparent success may conceal a specific failure mode visible only to practitioners who have seen that failure before. The judgment is not transmissible by documentation; it is transmitted by mentorship, by working on real illustrations alongside someone who has cultivated it, by the accumulated experience of seeing what works and what doesn't.