being a musician, i think i can relate myself to how your gf did those pp. when learning music, most students pay a lot of attention to what they do, but not what they hear, including myself during my earlier years in music learning. when students finally listen to the sound they produce, they'll start to go subconscious on what they do to achieve the sound. then the student started to exaggerate the gestures that they were afraid to do initially, without them noticing until the teacher pointed it out.

sometimes we're afraid to move the slider beyond what we considered "overcook" simply because we know how the original scene looked like. we tend to go by "rules" like - prevent shadow and highlight clipping, balanced tonal range, etc, which s7's gf didnt care and went for a dramatic look - boosted highlights and color, and deep shadows. also our eyes has some "memory" effect and we can't seems to accept dramatic difference in a short period of time. try to over saturate a photo and save it. go for a lunch and come back straight look at the over saturated photo for a while, then reset all setting - voila! now the original looked washed out lol.

DD Coffee by Junrong LuLu, on Flickr


Suddenly crave for donuts.. by Junrong LuLu, on Flickr