How much manipulation with photoshop, pic monkey etc is ok with you?
My opinion is that we are image makers and anything goes. I flip, crop and clone to my hearts content if it improves the image. I'm firmly in the Pictorialism camp!
My friend thinks the opposite - she tweaks a teeny tiny bit, hardly at all and is proud that her photos are sooc.
In my first year, I was completely against doing (too much) editing to my photos. This year, I got given Photoshop for my birthday (conveniently in January!) and have slowly been learning it.
I don't have a problem with people digitally manipulating their images. What I have a problem with is people not bothering to try and get their images right in camera and thinking "oh, I can just edit this bin out" rather than composing properly.
A big reason why I said no to editing last year was so that I could learn how to use my camera. I'm not perfect at it yet, but I now have a much better understanding than I did when I started - a base on which to grow.
I think the two points of view are equally valid. It depends on what you are striving to achieve.
As far as I am concerned I really prefer my images to stand on their merits with the minimum of manipulation - I do crop and clone out unavoidable things which spoil the whole - but I like to look back at a picture and think - yes, that is what I actually saw then, on that day.
The other option is to create a little work of art which may, to a greater or lesser extent, be a heightened version of the original scene.
Work of art or SOOC? I suppose the ultimate achievement would be take something SOOC which was in itself a perfect little work of art and maybe that is what I am after!
@cally Yes, I understand what you say, but can composing properly often not be done just as easily in the edit as the shot?
I often fail to see things in shot - and am USELESS at getting horizons straight etc (I am dyslexic and have poor spatial awareness, not lazy). So it's much easier in the edit for me.
And - as far as I can see- doesn't matter at all which end it's done at.
Cally makes a good point - I am still learning to use my camera and I agree its important to have a base on which to grow - I need to learn the basics first (and I am far from that!)
@boogie I was using composition as an example. Cropping is great, and I do crop a lot. And I know what you mean about horizons - I'm not dyslexic, but my horizons are awful! I'm always sorting them out.
If you like, maybe a better example may be exposure - learning how to properly expose for highlights and shadows and similar techniques.
I wasn't saying that editing is bad - not at all and editing is not a problem for me, just that learning how to get things right in camera can be incredibly beneficial.
@boogie Depends how good you are at editing :P My boyfriend does get a bit fed up when I spend ages trying to work out the best exposure settings, especially if I can't work it out properly myself!
This photo - http://365project.org/boogie/365/2012-11-26 - (not great but my present standard) has all sorts of changes (flip, crop, cloning out of black logo on mask, cloning out of a poster on the wall, removing a line off the wall, black edge, and I intend to change the red bit - when I find out how!)
But I wouldn't say any of that unless asked - it's pretty irrelevant really, don't you think?
@boogie by identify, I mean if asked or if you are required to do so. Or instance, if you were to submit that photo to a newspaper or magazine as photojournalistic, you would not be allowed to do the manipulations that you have listed. However, if it is editorial, the adjustments may be allowed depending on the specific guidelines. Many areas of photography have "rules" you must follow, particularly in contests and publishing.
I am on the side of developing your own personal style and edit what you want to with your own photos. I will tell you that after taking two darkroom classes in film, I can post edit my shots tremendously to make them work for me. I can crop, straighten, enlarge one area, create more contrast, do a double exposure print, and more. So do what makes you happy.
No 2 people will ever see exactly the same thing when looking at a scene or object. It doesn't matter that what they both are looking at must abide by the laws of physics. Its like a face. I might think the eyes look larger than someone else, or I might see a different shade in the iris than someone else sees. The camera is no different. It sees a scene/object its own way (and for the record, your digital camera does processing of its own, so nothing is pure sooc unless YOU alter the contrast, sharpness, etc IN CAMERA... if you don't, the camera just did an auto process on what you snapped a picture of)
For this reason, it is silly to downgrade the end result someone gets via digital manipulation. There is a reason a great photograph can be displayed in an art gallery - it is ART. Art is subjective. Is Dadaism or Cubism not art because it isn't "realistic"? Of course not, they are both very valid forms of art. So is digital manipulation of a photograph. One person's art is NOT superior to another person's art. You either love it or you don't but that doesn't make it less valid because its sooc or less valid because its manipulated. Its just different.
and for the record, I don't know anyone that would say works by Ansel Adams are not photographs, but by his own admission, Ansel Adams did a lot of post processing in the darkroom (yep, manipulation existed long before the digital age).... so by "photojournalism" standards, Ansel Adams would not be able to submit any of his photos. Should we call his images "film art" instead of "photographs" IMHO the answer is no.
I just wanted to provide some perspective since people tend to forget how much manipulation existed before Photoshop. What is important is that the end result is something that makes YOU happy. You can please some of the people some of the time but you will make yourself absolutely miserable if you try to please all of the people at ANY time. If you are true to yourself and your art, you will have plenty of people that will respect you for it - whether you go the sooc route or the post processing route.
Obviously art can't be limited by definition or guidelines. I think we could leave it at that. For me, though, it all depends on meaning. Are you creating a landscape that never happened, or trying to capture a concept? I'd rather learn to paint or draw what's in my head, but I love capturing what I see or feel with the camera.
@boogie :) Not sure I understand what you mean by "improve" - if we don't capture only what we see then we're capturing what we feel (in my book, that is, haha). Either way, it's creation in one form or another and I can't help but love it all.
At first I was terrified to even dare crop a shot, then realised how much it could be improved by a crop, or subtle differences in shadow/saturation or complete changes for the fun of it. I am limited by my lovely little P&S and very happy to make alterations which I know, after all, others can make with their cameras, so what's the difference?
And despite all this, sometimes I take a shot which feels good enough to stand on its own and I like that too.
I tweak, but as little as possible. I don't mind when others manipulate their images as long as the final image is fairly true to reality. Programs are robust and clever enough now that nearly anyone can place a butterfly on the nose of a puppy where there wasn't one and make it look "real," those are the ones that make me want to break something...
Agree with @jsw0109 that manipulation has existed long before PS. I'm getting into film and was given a whole slew of tools to enlarge my negatives into prints. While I haven't actually attempted it yet, I have different tools for dogding and burning, a feather that I think is used similar to the blemish tool, a guide to measure which EV works best for the shot. Manipulation is part of the art. With digital I might manipulate a little bit...or a whole lot. Depends on my impression of the "mood" of the photo.
" Programs are robust and clever enough now that nearly anyone can place a butterfly on the nose of a puppy where there wasn't one and make it look "real," those are the ones that make me want to break something... "
Why is that? If they painted the image would you feel that way?
@grizzlysghost Yes - but it's a fine line, isn't it? The one I linked to is 'real' but with bits cloned out. An added butterfly on a dog's nose isn't real but If the impact is in the unexpectedness then we need to see the impact before we find out how it was done, I think.
I try to capture a nice pic without editing because that is my personal goal. Most of my pics are SOOC but occasionally I crop something. I try to use the right settings in my camera and will often take a few pics of the same scene with different settings if it means getting the most realistic pic of what I am actually seeing.
We used to dodge and burn and do all sorts of things in the darkroom ( have spent many happy hours doing it!!) without thinking it detracted from the photo. With the advent of digital it has all become so much easier and reversible without wasting expensive paper and chemicals.
The only bother I have with it really is that a lot of editing you see is not done well which really does detract!
I like to have it SOOC when possible but if it needs editing then why not? It's just that I am in the camp of the "not so expert" editors. Really must learn much more!
I like photos that are taken using the photographer's best abilities to handle a camera to produce images naturally and then a certain degree of subtle editing to bring that image out is fine.
However my personal taste is that I do not like when someone goes nuts with a heavy hand or uses phoney manipulations to create an image - which is more graphic computer art then photography.
To me a photograph and a manipulated image are two separate things, what you start with is the organic image, what you end up with is fantasy. Not saying editing out something is right or wrong, it's an art form, restricted creativity is holding back progress. If we were never to dream, we would never have left the caves.
@spirrowshoot My thoughts entirely. I have tried processing but am never happy with the results because they end up being something that I never saw and to me the best photography is about capturing a moment. That said I will improve pictures by cropping and straightening etc and occasionally add a frame but that's about it. I'm a SOOC fan,
I think it is purely personal. There are so many heavily processed pictures that post that people just drool over. It might just not be my thing. As a preferred SOOC shooter, I don't consider myself a graphic artist. Technology is great, and both sides of the equation have their place.
Personally I love both worlds, I love seeing amazing sooc images & images that haven't been photoshopped to the hills. However I love a good manipulation and the creativity that comes along with that. Digital photography and art have come so far over the years.
I tend to manipulate most of my images a lot, it's been fun and I am exploring the digital art side of things a lot more now. It amazes me how you can take as many images as you like and put them all together to create a work of art.
@lellie Agreed. I don't have much problem with adding contrast or even HDR, either, since the camera doesn't capture detail or color as well as our eyes in the first place :) Anything more and it's more art than it is photography.
Interesting discussion. My two cents worth. Others above have said some similar things...
The camera and the human eye (eyes) "see" very differently. Human vision is bioptic (is there such a word?) for a start, and is attached to the most powerful image processor ever, the brain. And it is processing all the time, rendering (in 3-D!) the "shot" (or the video) according to how it "feels" at the time, and what it considers "reality" should actually be. The eyes, especially with the brain attached, are much more capable than any camera or software to "adjust" color, intensity, brightness, contrast, distortion, perspective correction, sharpness. Even content, see the discussion about "ghosts" below. On and on. And you don't realize you are "processing" as you see.
The camera is different. For a start it is "monoptic." It can't even do perspective correctly without a lot of "outside" help. it records the flat "reality" image with none of the "trappings" of "extra visual" reality of the observing brain. By the way this is part of the reason why different people are attracted strongly to different shots. It's reflecting each person's different experience and reality.
But even in the lowly camera there is significant processing "fix-up" going on for mundane things, even if you didn't set any adjustable parameters. Even if you did "nothing" the "defaults" process and manipulate the image all the time. Even the selection of aperture to control depth of field is a form of "processing" that is above "reality." Should that not be allowed by the ardent SOOC folks?
Lastly, probably most significantly, the eye (and the brain) can even "create" (from the brain's memory) extra "non-reality." It is possible that "ghost sightings" and other such extra-sensory phenomena are created exactly like this. isn't this akin to "photoshopping" the actual content? Extreme cases of such things are common. Hallucinating, it is called.
So if our brains do this, and our camera shots do not show what you "saw" (after all that brain processing) then isn't it really your obligation to "adjust" the image so that others can see and experience more of what you saw and perceived, that is not recorded in the "flat image" that the camera records?
Photo editing like photo taking is an art in itself they both require an eye for what makes a good picture and to be honest most digital editing software has nothing in it that could not be done in a darkroom with the right know how. Photos have been edited right from the very earliest all that has changed is the technique to make it easier to do, but cant that also be said for a digital camera.It is just as easy for someone to mess up a shot in editing as it is in camera and lets face it if you take a really out of focus poorly exposed shot there is no editing software on earth that will fix it. photography and photo editing to me and many others have always gone hand in hand (after all who wouldn't want to make their shot the best it could possibly be) and long may it be so.
Photography has change alot in the last few years and one should use all the tools you can.Other wise maybe to be called a photographer and not a artist you should use a polaroid camera with only one setting. Just to say your pure....................My nephew straps a camera to a tree. With more money spent he gets better pictures of the deer he wants to look at. Some would call him a photographer???Me with a big lens takes a photo at 400 yards from the deer. Crop it and tweek it and Iam a artist?? I think the old timers took alot of money and school to get good. Now any fool like myself can get great pictures and teach myself how for pennys.With the money I have not had to spend on development of pictures, I have been thinking about renting a different lens just to see what it will do............Artist ...Ok ...like a sad song I have had pictures sometimes move people to tears . When you can do that it don't matter how you got there. Use what ever you can to get the shot you want and damm your good if they can't tell what you did to get it.Tell the crybabys to shut up and listen to their old vinyl records because they think the sound of the needle sounds better than a CD,.
I developed my first roll of film more than 1/2 century ago and started "serious" darkroom work more than 30 years ago. My darkroom gathers dust now, but I can tell you that I was doing a lot of the same manipulations in the darkroom that I am doing in Photoshop now. We had the same discussion in camera club about manipulated darkroom images that we are having now about manipulated digital images. Most of my 365 images have minimal adjustments for exposure, and probably some cropping, but once in awhile I will "create" an image. Both results are legitimate photography, and I guarantee that some of you will like both results and some of you will hate them. It is human nature, so you might as well do whatever you personally enjoy the most.
As said above it's all personal taste, personally I don't really like the hugely manipulated shots where too much has been added so it looks nothing like the original!
But I do use PS to bring out the best in my own photos ie saturation, contrast etc so not sure what that makes me probably a slight hypocrite but there you go!
My sister โ @grammyn โ and I are at opposite ends of this spectrum and yet we totally respect each other's photos and photo style. Frankly, I am envious of her ability to consistently take fabulous sooc photos and am proud of the leaps she is taking into the field of editing. I do not have the patience or the eye to use the camera as an "editing" tool... and by that I just mean to use it to get the perfect composition and/or the perfect settings. For me it's easier to post-process, though I don't have the patience to use "proper" editing tools either. I think of myself as more of an artist who uses a camera as a tool her art creations and Katy as more of a "true" photographer/artist. I believe part of our differences in photography come from the fact that she used a camera much more than I did in the film days, so she had to learn to take great shots sooc, while I didn't really start shooting until digital days, so I could shoot and shoot and shoot and then delete and edit to my heart's content. Early in my 365 days I was very offended and defensive regarding sooc vs. post-processing, but now I believe that both styles of photography are equally art... no different than oil vs. acrylic vs. pastel, etc. or modernists vs. traditionalists.
@marilyn Yes - it's so easy now to take 1000 photos, then keep one! I was asking the experts at our camera club if it will one day be possible to take AV footage then keep one frame, but they said the technology is so different it's very unlikely.
I'd love to become really proficient in both fields like @tracywilliams whose photos I admire X100000000.
Firstly I think there is a place in the world for both. Personally I love capturing a shot in camera that needs no messing with. But I also love and get inspired by messing around in photoshop.
What really gives me a buzz at the moment is processing in a way that does not look like it has been processed. Thats why I decided to take part in the WWYD70 challenge this week. Heres my attempt:
Not over processed but brings a slightly different feel to the original.
I thought to demostrate this I would attach a series of images that show the many sides to post processing.
Top left = original shot with no processing. Natural look.
Top right = image centred and blacked out at the back. No processing to the face. Natural look.
Bottom left = HDR type processing. Fair amount of processes used to achieve this look. Think you can definatly tell this is processed but still retains a authentic feel.
Bottom right = Two tone silhoutte processing. Majorily processed. Impossible to capture in camera.
I personally like all of them but I am sure some will not. That is the best thing about this stuff for me. Debate and discussion on this subject is fascinating.
@brav I like them all too - but of the 'natural' three I like the second best. Cloning out distractions matters to me - even in natural photos. Something which draws your eye out of the image (like the yellow blob) must GO!
In my opinion the answer is simple because it all depends on the result you're wanna achieve. Sometimes you have a picture in your mind you just can't realize without an evening photoshopping. Sometime the best photo has a minor thingy you wanna remove to make it perfect, which only takes a second.
Ansel Adams was as good at burning and dodging and choosing the paper that made his photos look incredible as he was at taking the original shot. He used both to produce what many of us ooh and aah over.
I use both. If I am doing anything fancy like selective colour or anything like that I use photoshop. However I mostly do SOOC - don't crop or adjust contrast or anything like that. I do like both natural and manipulated.
I love it when I get the image I want without tweaking but often I crop, straighten, change to BW or sepia, enhance color or contrast -- but after all that's what dark rooms are for when you use film. Even Ansel Adams tweaked, dodged, burned, etc in his dark room.
@jsw0109 Thanks Jeff. You can tell I'm passionate about this line of thought! Ben Long the author of Complete Digital Photography, the latest edition, set me off thinking like this.
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I don't have a problem with people digitally manipulating their images. What I have a problem with is people not bothering to try and get their images right in camera and thinking "oh, I can just edit this bin out" rather than composing properly.
A big reason why I said no to editing last year was so that I could learn how to use my camera. I'm not perfect at it yet, but I now have a much better understanding than I did when I started - a base on which to grow.
Also: Instagram. 'Nuff said.
As far as I am concerned I really prefer my images to stand on their merits with the minimum of manipulation - I do crop and clone out unavoidable things which spoil the whole - but I like to look back at a picture and think - yes, that is what I actually saw then, on that day.
The other option is to create a little work of art which may, to a greater or lesser extent, be a heightened version of the original scene.
Work of art or SOOC? I suppose the ultimate achievement would be take something SOOC which was in itself a perfect little work of art and maybe that is what I am after!
I often fail to see things in shot - and am USELESS at getting horizons straight etc (I am dyslexic and have poor spatial awareness, not lazy). So it's much easier in the edit for me.
And - as far as I can see- doesn't matter at all which end it's done at.
When we have Camera Club competitions the judges often suggest clonings of extraneous bits and pieces to improve images.
If you like, maybe a better example may be exposure - learning how to properly expose for highlights and shadows and similar techniques.
I wasn't saying that editing is bad - not at all and editing is not a problem for me, just that learning how to get things right in camera can be incredibly beneficial.
This photo - http://365project.org/boogie/365/2012-11-26 - (not great but my present standard) has all sorts of changes (flip, crop, cloning out of black logo on mask, cloning out of a poster on the wall, removing a line off the wall, black edge, and I intend to change the red bit - when I find out how!)
But I wouldn't say any of that unless asked - it's pretty irrelevant really, don't you think?
No 2 people will ever see exactly the same thing when looking at a scene or object. It doesn't matter that what they both are looking at must abide by the laws of physics. Its like a face. I might think the eyes look larger than someone else, or I might see a different shade in the iris than someone else sees. The camera is no different. It sees a scene/object its own way (and for the record, your digital camera does processing of its own, so nothing is pure sooc unless YOU alter the contrast, sharpness, etc IN CAMERA... if you don't, the camera just did an auto process on what you snapped a picture of)
For this reason, it is silly to downgrade the end result someone gets via digital manipulation. There is a reason a great photograph can be displayed in an art gallery - it is ART. Art is subjective. Is Dadaism or Cubism not art because it isn't "realistic"? Of course not, they are both very valid forms of art. So is digital manipulation of a photograph. One person's art is NOT superior to another person's art. You either love it or you don't but that doesn't make it less valid because its sooc or less valid because its manipulated. Its just different.
I just wanted to provide some perspective since people tend to forget how much manipulation existed before Photoshop. What is important is that the end result is something that makes YOU happy. You can please some of the people some of the time but you will make yourself absolutely miserable if you try to please all of the people at ANY time. If you are true to yourself and your art, you will have plenty of people that will respect you for it - whether you go the sooc route or the post processing route.
i use a mix of sketches, photographs and digital manipulation- sometimes all 3 in the same picture..... and sometimes barely anything used.
its whatever you want to use to make the image you imagine
And despite all this, sometimes I take a shot which feels good enough to stand on its own and I like that too.
" Programs are robust and clever enough now that nearly anyone can place a butterfly on the nose of a puppy where there wasn't one and make it look "real," those are the ones that make me want to break something... "
Why is that? If they painted the image would you feel that way?
The only bother I have with it really is that a lot of editing you see is not done well which really does detract!
I like to have it SOOC when possible but if it needs editing then why not? It's just that I am in the camp of the "not so expert" editors. Really must learn much more!
However my personal taste is that I do not like when someone goes nuts with a heavy hand or uses phoney manipulations to create an image - which is more graphic computer art then photography.
I tend to manipulate most of my images a lot, it's been fun and I am exploring the digital art side of things a lot more now. It amazes me how you can take as many images as you like and put them all together to create a work of art.
The camera and the human eye (eyes) "see" very differently. Human vision is bioptic (is there such a word?) for a start, and is attached to the most powerful image processor ever, the brain. And it is processing all the time, rendering (in 3-D!) the "shot" (or the video) according to how it "feels" at the time, and what it considers "reality" should actually be. The eyes, especially with the brain attached, are much more capable than any camera or software to "adjust" color, intensity, brightness, contrast, distortion, perspective correction, sharpness. Even content, see the discussion about "ghosts" below. On and on. And you don't realize you are "processing" as you see.
The camera is different. For a start it is "monoptic." It can't even do perspective correctly without a lot of "outside" help. it records the flat "reality" image with none of the "trappings" of "extra visual" reality of the observing brain. By the way this is part of the reason why different people are attracted strongly to different shots. It's reflecting each person's different experience and reality.
But even in the lowly camera there is significant processing "fix-up" going on for mundane things, even if you didn't set any adjustable parameters. Even if you did "nothing" the "defaults" process and manipulate the image all the time. Even the selection of aperture to control depth of field is a form of "processing" that is above "reality." Should that not be allowed by the ardent SOOC folks?
Lastly, probably most significantly, the eye (and the brain) can even "create" (from the brain's memory) extra "non-reality." It is possible that "ghost sightings" and other such extra-sensory phenomena are created exactly like this. isn't this akin to "photoshopping" the actual content? Extreme cases of such things are common. Hallucinating, it is called.
So if our brains do this, and our camera shots do not show what you "saw" (after all that brain processing) then isn't it really your obligation to "adjust" the image so that others can see and experience more of what you saw and perceived, that is not recorded in the "flat image" that the camera records?
I would say yes, absolutely.
But I do use PS to bring out the best in my own photos ie saturation, contrast etc so not sure what that makes me probably a slight hypocrite but there you go!
I'd love to become really proficient in both fields like @tracywilliams whose photos I admire X100000000.
Firstly I think there is a place in the world for both. Personally I love capturing a shot in camera that needs no messing with. But I also love and get inspired by messing around in photoshop.
What really gives me a buzz at the moment is processing in a way that does not look like it has been processed. Thats why I decided to take part in the WWYD70 challenge this week. Heres my attempt:
Not over processed but brings a slightly different feel to the original.
I thought to demostrate this I would attach a series of images that show the many sides to post processing.
Top left = original shot with no processing. Natural look.
Top right = image centred and blacked out at the back. No processing to the face. Natural look.
Bottom left = HDR type processing. Fair amount of processes used to achieve this look. Think you can definatly tell this is processed but still retains a authentic feel.
Bottom right = Two tone silhoutte processing. Majorily processed. Impossible to capture in camera.
I personally like all of them but I am sure some will not. That is the best thing about this stuff for me. Debate and discussion on this subject is fascinating.
:)