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Post Processing
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Might aswell be the first to start this debate!
What your opinions on photoshopping images, and the like?
Do you do it? Is it too fake? How much makes it an illustration as opposed to a photograph?
I’ll hold my views back until we can get a proper chat going :)
Anyone thats seen my images will know I like playing about with PS. :D
For me, it’s all about the final image.. how we arrive at that is unimportant.
My preference is for natural looking photos, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been heavily manipulated in PS or the likes.
I’ve never shot film, never had the experience of a dark room, so Photoshop is my substitute
Agreed… I think it’s not about what the camera sees, but about what *you* see. Photography’s too beautiful and powerful a thing to leave it all to the machines. =)
I do very little manipulation if possible
Clone out a piece of dust, convert to b+w, increase contrast etc…
Try and keep it to that which you could do with film processing I guess.Like the photograph to appear how I saw it, not how I wish I saw it.
I clone out dust (scanned film)
maybe, and a big maybe, something distracting if I have missed it when I took the shot, but I don’t like doing it and rarely will
adjust levels
crop
i have done a little burning / dodging on a few shots
basically I don’t like to do anything that wouldn’t be done in a traditional darkroom anyway
for me photography is about capturing what you see at the time you see it not making up images and manipulation after the fact, I have no interest in anyones images that are made up of more than 1 image, it never existed so its not a photograph its just a made up image
I prefer to see photographs which look at they might have if produced on film
with the various post-production techiques available eg dodging/burning and so on.No problem with photoshop changes so long as the view is clear that manipulation
which really change the original photograph. Here I’m talking about things like
removing/adding people etc.. The IPPA awards last year went to a totally fake photograph.Quite incredible in my opinion considering all of the other fine photographs they could have chosen.
Just my opinion
Fred
I saw that too Fred, bit of a departure for them.
Personally everyone to their own.
I don’t think that pictures made up of more than one image can be classed as photography.
I don’t see anything wrong with levels, hue/saturation, sharpening, dodging/burning, and a bit of diffuse glow… but you can use them at different levels to give realistic, or seriously mad looking images. I like to push just slightly beyond the flatness of reality so that they have a bit of magic to them. It’s a physical impossibility to faithfully render what you saw with a camera in 2d so why not use all the tools available to try and convey what you feel about a scene?
This was a scanned neg, and it was really flat and boring. The picture above is what I had in my mind when I was out there with the camera…
elven wrote:
I don’t think that pictures made up of more than one image can be classed as photography.
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Couldnt agree more with that statement.
Basically, photography is an artform, you want something, everytime you press your shutter, you can imagine what you’re taking. You’ve got this idea in your head, and from when you take your shot, it’s up to you to get it the rest of the way.
This might be as simple as a raise in contrast, to having to burn something/someone completly out of an image. The limits of photography to photomanipulation, I guess are when the manipulating becomes the main focus of the image.
I started off in a darkroom really, and have brought it to a digital level, as you do. People would be suprised to find there are a lot of things that come directly from a darkroom from a photoshop (Except the undo button…and layers… bless’em!!!)
“I don’t think that pictures made up of more than one image can be classed as photography.”
I have to disagree with that…a carefully composed double exposure on film, is still a photograph…Even look at photographers like Angus McBean for portraits composed of different shots!
Fajitas! wrote:
Basically, photography is an artform,
It’s not nearly that simple; photography is other things beside art. There is a whole spectrum from abstract art through attempting to depict reality to varying degrees. One problem I see is that while the creator of an image might say ‘this is art’, other people might see it differently. If a photo is presented as a straight depiction of reality, whereas in fact it has been substantially manipulated, then that could be seen as a form of dishonesty even if that isn’t the intention. This is a vast topic for discussion and I don’t think there is any clear black and white, just shades of grey. No photograph is an entirely accurate reproduction of reality.
Just because something is/was done in a darkroom doesn’t make it OK – I don’t follow the logic that because something could be done in a darkroom automatically makes it fine to do the same thing digitally.
An example of the kind of manipulation I am unhappy with is here (at least, I think it is, the Luminous Landscape site appears to be down at the moment). A documentary-type photo has been manipulated to depict something that wasn’t. The author claims that this just represents his vision, but I see it as downright misleading.
Personally I have no problem with the use of software/darkroom techniques to bring an image to an accurate depiction of reality. Further than that, it becomes a much darker shade of grey and more dependent on the context.
GilesKS wrote:
An example of the kind of manipulation I am unhappy with is here (at least, I think it is, the Luminous Landscape site appears to be down at the moment). A documentary-type photo has been manipulated to depict something that wasn’t. The author claims that this just represents his vision, but I see it as downright misleading.
Have to disagree with you on that – in the example there the photographer removed a plastic rubbish bag which wasnt very appealing – he also stylised the picture to make it more interesting and maybe to broaden its appeal by giving it more of an ‘any city’ kind of look.
For my money photography crosses over when you start combining different pictures into one (I am not talking about photo-stitching panoramas here). Taking elements from one picture and transposing them into another creates a collage or a piece of digital art – not a photograph in my opinion.
Airbrushing out something (in the given example a plastic rubbish bag) doesnt make it less of a picture or somehow crossing over to the realm of digital art. I would agree that if the picture was being described as – say a journalistic picture or a documentary type of picture then it should not be edited in that way – but for an art print kind of picture removing un-necessary distracting objects is valid imo.
Now this is something I object to and its was the Irish Photographer winner of the Open Category in 2005
The crows were added, the scarecrows were added as was the photographers face to the photograph.
This is not in my opinion photography a 12yo kid could combine this element together.
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