I love an edit on the day and cannot look at it a week later: where is the line between processing and overcooking?

The other half is that you are editing without a destination, which is why less looks unfinished rather than restrained.

Decide what the photograph is about before you touch anything. One sentence. The light on the wall. Her expression. The emptiness of the street. Then every adjustment either serves that or it does not, and you have a criterion instead of a feeling.

That also tells you where to stop: when the thing you named is as clear as it needs to be. Without it, the only available question is does this look better, and the answer to that is always yes to a bit more.

A practical order that keeps things honest:

Global corrections first: exposure, white balance, straightening. Fixing what is wrong.

Then the local work: bringing attention to the subject, holding back what competes with it. This is where a photograph is actually made and it is what people skip in favour of global sliders.

Then colour, minimally.

Most overcooked images are a global-slider edit doing the job that local work should have done. If a picture needs the whole frame pushed to make the subject stand out, the subject usually needs a small local adjustment instead: and the result looks better and reads as untouched.

There is a mechanism behind the on-the-day effect and knowing it gives you the method.

Your eyes adapt to whatever is in front of them. As you push contrast and saturation gradually, each step looks like a small improvement relative to the last one, and your reference point moves with it. You never see the cumulative distance from where you started. A week later your eyes have reset and you see the total.

So the fixes are all about restoring a reference:

Toggle the before and after constantly. Not at the end - every few adjustments. That single habit catches most of it, because it forcibly resets your comparison.

Do not export on the day. Edit, sleep, look again in the morning, then export. This is the highest-return habit in this thread and it costs nothing but patience.

Work at a smaller size. Overcooking is easier to see in a thumbnail than at full screen, which is why it is obvious in a feed and invisible while editing.

Give yourself a time limit. Most overcooking happens in the last twenty minutes of a long edit, when you have run out of real improvements and keep moving sliders.

And notice the asymmetry: you can always add more later. You cannot un-see an edit you have already published.

Two calibration habits worth having, because judgement develops much faster with a reference than without.

Compare against work you admire, at the same size, side by side. Not from memory. Open a photograph you think is beautifully handled next to yours and the difference in restraint is usually immediate and slightly humbling.

Compare against your own edits from a year ago. This is the one that tells you whether you are drifting. If your recent work is consistently louder than your older work, that is not development, that is adaptation: and it is exactly what you have described.

A couple of technical things that make this measurable rather than subjective:

Check your screen brightness and the room. Editing on a very bright screen in a dark room produces images that are too dark and too contrasty everywhere else, and it is a common cause of the a-week-later effect.

Look at the histogram for clipped shadows and highlights. Not a rule, a lot of good photographs clip deliberately: but it tells you when a decision was made accidentally.

Look at it on a phone. Most people will see it there, and it is a different rendering from your monitor. Things that are subtle on a calibrated screen frequently look heavy-handed on a phone, which is where the audience is.