In the past I've been really enthusiastic about manips. I was one of the few manippers to alter facial expressions and eventually body positions. It was a lot of work but it went mostly under-appreciated in the community. It left me a little discouraged. I'm beginning to move on from manipping but I'd like to here what a lot of you think.

What level of work would you say is fitting for a hypnosis themed image alteration?

Hard to say honestly. I feel it at least needs to be more than making the eyes a spiral or something, no matter how good it may look.The whole point of manips/edits are to be transformative of the original work. A lot of manips on the site I find don't really fit their source image. The people who add text to images are a little further up on this "spectrum", as that adds perspective, but even that isn't always the case.

I do feel you though. I did a few manips back in the beginning of last year and tried to up the editing on each successive one. A few of them I tried to match my editing to the art style of the image (replicating backgrounds, using specific brushes, etc.). One of em' got over a 100 votes for some reason despite being fairly basic. After that I threw out about 3 very mundane edits just to gauge the audience.And while those didn't get as well received, the gap wasn't that large. So because of that and dwindling interest, I eventually stopped.

So tl;dr I think manips should go past just changing the eyes or adding a solid-color block of text, but not so far as to try completely changing the source image itself. Adding/extending background elements or even getting fancy with text(boxes) is enough.

One of the problems with detailed manips like facial expression changes and the such is that the average user will assume the original piece just looked like that to begin with. I'm sure I recall at least one instance where a piece was QC'd for low effort because the manip was so good that they couldn't tell that it was manipulated. (the piece was restored when it was pointed out)

As well, at a certain point, if you are going into so much detail with changes to an original image, it can become easier to just start making art yourself.

It takes real skill though to make a manip in such a way that one can't even tell it was manipped in the first place.

I think it's really contextual. But I know there's a certain point where it's manipped so far, it may as well be a new piece, or something has been manipped to oblivion and it's not even fun anymore. Those situations excluded, I think it's only too far when it's considered so by the manipper. If the manipper is no longer having fun or doesn't like the work they're currently doing, it definitely loses meaning and value for them, and likely for the audience/viewers as well.

The main question is why you're making manips in the first place, and only you can really answer that. One thing to think about is how much you care about your personal satisfaction vs what the community wants. If you care about stuff like number of votes and comments, you have to temper your expectations based mostly on the subject matter (just one example, the more NSFW the pic the more votes it tends to get). Most people don't click the source link, so they'll never be able to appreciate how much you changed the picture from the original.

Personally I find the image alteration part to be tedious, so I usually focus on writing. And I work reeeally slowly. But as long as I do my best and some people like it, I'm happy.

You can always change your work if you do not like it. I think everyone can try to start some business. I want to open online real estate agency in my city. I have already download crm platform for it on www.espocrm.com/download/