Can PhotoShop really fix everything

[bennielou]

As I have read through the threads, I have come to the concussion that people rely on PhotoShop way to much. Statements made, such as " I will just photoshop that"

Now don't get me wrong I think PhotoShop is a great tool, but that is what it is, a tool, not a fix it all. I believe that if people spend more time looking through the view finder and learning their equipment better, the less time they will spend in PhotoShop fixing everything that show have never happened in the first place. I think a lot of people need to go back to film and learn the hard way. Maybe they would respect photography and what it takes to make a GOOD photograph.

Just my thoughts

As someone who is the hired girl to fix all the f'd up situations, I can tell you that PS can not fix all. But it can fix a host of problems if you know your way around it.

While I agree that it would be preferable if people knew what they are doing, I spend a whole lot of time (or I used to, now I make them fend for themselves) in fixing horrible wrongdoings on parts of the photographer.

The problem with your arguement, is that some people do the kind of work that incorperates many different lighting situations in a matter of moments. Those are left to PS for WB or exposure.

[Ads]

[ghache]

PP is now a major part of the long photography era we are in. its like anything else, there is evolution and some people will need to follow.

[c.cloudwalker]

PP is now a major part of the long photography era we are in. its like anything else, there is evolution and some people will need to follow.

I trust you mean digital PP.

PP has been around as long as photography.

[Gaerek]

I just found this blog post by Scott Bourne that I find pretty relevant to what we're talking about here.

Photography v. Reality Photofocus

I think he kinda hit the nail on the head here. Here's a snippet that I found particularly pertinent.

For me, all that matters now, all that has ever mattered, all that will ever matter going forward is the picture. What someone thinks of it, how they interpret it, whether or not they think it’s real, fake, art or science – none of that is in my control. I can’t control what anyone else thinks, nor do I want to or would I try. My images are simply representative of what I personally happen to think of a given moment in time.

He goes on later to say this, which I had a laugh at, actually:

When people engage in the Canon v. Nikon, digital v. film, Photoshop v. no Photoshop, Windows v. Mac wars, I don’t feel like they’re contributing much to the world or to photography. I think the “is photography real or not” discussion falls under pretty much the same category. Instead of debating whether or not photography is real, why not do something that DOES matter? Why not make a good picture?

Because, after all, isn't that all that matters?

[ghpham]

OK, let me ask you this for the sake of this discussion (I don't want to discuss the photo as such in detail, it isn't "art"! I know it. It isn't even good) - is this photo "an abuse of Photoshop"?



I'm asking because - while this photo was very (!) spur of the moment, taken out of the side window of a passing bus, and my intention was to capture the solitude of the countryside we were going through in Turkey, and the fact that not all had the comfort of travelling in a nice bus, but some had to walk - the man originally was walking right underneath that tree. That, however, felt so unbalanced to me for this photo that (for the first time ever in my life, I must admit) I decided to cut him out of where he actually was and put him to where you can now see him.

And upon looking closer, I did not even clone the part where he once was well enough, it shows ... Not good! But none of that is the point I want to discuss here.

My question is: Is this abuse in your eyes?

I think it's an abuse if you want to call it that. I say so because you didn't really capture what you "saw". I doubt if you enter such a picture into a contest, that it would be allowed. Now of course, you could set it up in such a manner that the man was actually walking by the road....

As to the OP, I guess, the only comment I have is for the newbies to get as much correct in camera as they can. I see no joy in spending countless hours in front of a computer when you could use those times to practice photography skills.

[Gaerek]

OK, let me ask you this for the sake of this discussion (I don't want to discuss the photo as such in detail, it isn't "art"! I know it. It isn't even good) - is this photo "an abuse of Photoshop"?


I'm asking because - while this photo was very (!) spur of the moment, taken out of the side window of a passing bus, and my intention was to capture the solitude of the countryside we were going through in Turkey, and the fact that not all had the comfort of travelling in a nice bus, but some had to walk - the man originally was walking right underneath that tree. That, however, felt so unbalanced to me for this photo that (for the first time ever in my life, I must admit) I decided to cut him out of where he actually was and put him to where you can now see him.

And upon looking closer, I did not even clone the part where he once was well enough, it shows ... Not good! But none of that is the point I want to discuss here.

My question is: Is this abuse in your eyes?

I think it's an abuse if you want to call it that. I say so because you didn't really capture what you "saw". I doubt if you enter such a picture into a contest, that it would be allowed. Now of course, you could set it up in such a manner that the man was actually walking by the road....

As to the OP, I guess, the only comment I have is for the newbies to get as much correct in camera as they can. I see no joy in spending countless hours in front of a computer when you could use those times to practice photography skills.

Personally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with what was done here. If LaFoto hadn't mentioned that the guy was moved, I would have never noticed. Since it was mentioned, it's easy to spot where he was cloned. In the end, all that matters is the end result, the final image. I would never have made a second glance at the original photograph that LaFoto described, since having the man on the same side as the tree wouldn't have looked very good. This way, it's at least an interesting photo.

Whether it would be allowed into a competition isn't really the point. Every photo competition has different rules, and even categories. If LaFoto had taken a couple more minutes with the PP, you would likely never be able to tell the man was moved.

[Derrel]

I just found this blog post by Scott Bourne that I find pretty relevant to what we're talking about here.

Photography v. Reality Photofocus

>SNIP>

I really have trouble with a blogger like Scott Bourne who calls Arnold Newman "one of the first environmental portraitists". No way--Newman began working around 1942 or so...August Sander was an unquestioned master of the environmental portrait, and began working professionally in 1901. The work of August Sander was a big influence on photographers for almost two full decades before Newman began his professional career. Newman came along 40 years after Sander began...Sander was well-known, famous even, back when Newman began his professional career while working for hire shooting 49 cent studio portraits in New York City [literally, 49 cents]. By the time Newman started in the business, Sander had been shooting professionally for roughly 41 years...

I'm just sayin'...Beaumont Newhall wrote The History of Photography many years ago, and Mr. Bourne's understanding of who was first in environmental portraiture is a seriously flawed assertion, off by four decades.

Photography has changed greatly over the years. There have been many essays written about what "is" and "is not" photography, and the debates began in the 1850's,and have continued across the decades. Pictorialism was huge at one time, but it gave way to the deep depth of field and sharp renderings of the so-called f/64 Group aka the Group f/64 people, most famous of which turned out to be Ansel Adams. Over the decades, what is considered photography has changed quite a bit, and now that silver-based emulsion on substrate has been replaced by pixel wells and electrical charges stored in computer files, "photography" has changed in a very fundamental way. There is no longer a fixed, permanent negative or positive with the silver granuales and grains and or dye clusters all arranged in one,discrete order; the "image" now is all a bunch of 1's and 0's, and we can no longer view an image capture as a plate or negative or positive transparency--we need a computer to see the image in any form.

"Pure photography" is a difficult term to pin down. There really is no such thing as pure photography--that's just an impossible definition to work with. But there is a distinction between photography and digital illustration, computer-generated imagery, documentary versus artistic photography, and so on. Those arguing that Photoshop imitates the traditional darkroom are greatly oversimplifying or even distorting the nature of modern image editing software; we can take a digitized image today and make HUGE global changes, as well as small changes,adjustments, and montages in just seconds to minutes. The same degree of control did not and will never exist in silver-based images simply because a computer can perform many more steps than any human worker can perform in a darkroom using any of the old-time darkroom processes like Cibachrome, C-print, dye transfer, silver gelatin, or platinum/palladium,etc. On a silver-based capture, like a negative, there is a definite order and arrangement of the image that the photographer works from; with a digital image file, the order of the pixels can be easily and quickly altered,and the results previewed before a print is developed, washed,dried,and reviewed. Traditional film-based photography and digital capture are really very different beasts, in many ways.

A good example a lot of simple thinkers trot out is Jerry Uelsmann, who is probably the most famous traditional darkroom photo montage artists of the 1960's,1970's,and 1980's. He is one of the masters of the photo montage printed in the wet darkroom,and it took him many,many years to develop his skill level, and he was one of only a handful of photographers of the modern era to become widely famous as a photo manipulator. Today, what Uelsmann took decades to master in the traditional darkoom,working with multiple negatives, a tens of thousands of Photoshop jockeys can accomplish sitting at a desk, sipping a $4 Starbucks latte and working with a mouse and pen and tablet. Today,fantastical, surreal,incredible "darkroom work" can be done by high school kids. So, saying that post-processing has always been a part of photography is rather a simplistic over-exaggeration; to use an analogy, that's like saying, "the Wright brothers were involved in the aerospace industry." Ehh....no, not really.

Photography was concerned with depicting reality very early on...then the photo montage craze took hold and by the 1870's there were loads of crazy,wild allegorical multiple-negative photographs made...by the late 1920's, the mainstream shifted to the sharp,well-defined look Adams made his living shooting...by the early 1970's that style of imagery lost favor and more fanciful,more-manipulated pictures became fashionable...now we are in another period where representational or "straight" images are giving way to more heavily-manipulated, computer-generated images--much like happened in the 1870's and the 1960's-1970's era.

Honestly, while images fashions have swung back and forth like the proverbial pendulum, since the 1840's, we are now entering into an entirely NEW era, where the "picture" no longer begins with a real,tangible, fixed image file, but just a bunch of 1's and 0's that only a computer can render.
The biggest difference between digital imaging and traditional photography is that digital imaging requires a computer, while in traditional photography a computer is *optional*. And because of that, digital imaging allows us almost unlimited possibilities in image reconstruction and adjustment, while darkroom-based imaging has definite limitations. I'm not saying either is better or more noble, but there are some huge differences between traditional photography methods,like shooting on film and making traditional silver gelatin B&W prints, and modern, digital capture that is computer-adjusted and inkjet printed.

[JasonLambert]

Ok... This discussion is like Steven Spielberg telling Andy Warhol he's not an artist because he used silk screen instead of the silver screen. PS or not we are all after OUR OWN interpretation of a good image. Some tell the guy to move closer to the road and some put him there later.

Oh... And I would have to say that this is a little conceded...

[ghpham]

OK, let me ask you this for the sake of this discussion (I don't want to discuss the photo as such in detail, it isn't "art"! I know it. It isn't even good) - is this photo "an abuse of Photoshop"?


I'm asking because - while this photo was very (!) spur of the moment, taken out of the side window of a passing bus, and my intention was to capture the solitude of the countryside we were going through in Turkey, and the fact that not all had the comfort of travelling in a nice bus, but some had to walk - the man originally was walking right underneath that tree. That, however, felt so unbalanced to me for this photo that (for the first time ever in my life, I must admit) I decided to cut him out of where he actually was and put him to where you can now see him.

And upon looking closer, I did not even clone the part where he once was well enough, it shows ... Not good! But none of that is the point I want to discuss here.

My question is: Is this abuse in your eyes?

I think it's an abuse if you want to call it that. I say so because you didn't really capture what you "saw". I doubt if you enter such a picture into a contest, that it would be allowed. Now of course, you could set it up in such a manner that the man was actually walking by the road....

As to the OP, I guess, the only comment I have is for the newbies to get as much correct in camera as they can. I see no joy in spending countless hours in front of a computer when you could use those times to practice photography skills.

Personally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with what was done here. If LaFoto hadn't mentioned that the guy was moved, I would have never noticed. Since it was mentioned, it's easy to spot where he was cloned. In the end, all that matters is the end result, the final image. I would never have made a second glance at the original photograph that LaFoto described, since having the man on the same side as the tree wouldn't have looked very good. This way, it's at least an interesting photo.

Whether it would be allowed into a competition isn't really the point. Every photo competition has different rules, and even categories. If LaFoto had taken a couple more minutes with the PP, you would likely never be able to tell the man was moved.

That's not the point. He posted the photo asking if we think by moving the person whether or not that would constitute an abuse. To me, this type of photograph is supposed to tell a story. Something along the line of "while on a bus, I saw the man walking alone along the road, and it made me think of solitude and I took the photo". If you have to go to this degree and force the photo, then it lost it's mystique, and there would be no sense of connection to the scene.

Now, I think it's ok to use Photoshop for such thing as making colors pop, smoothing someone's skin for instance, but I would never recommend it to a newbie as a mean to correction a composition. I see quite a few C&C where a newbie is advised to clone out, say, a branch sticking out from someone's head. The problem with such an advise is that it does not convey the proper message to the newbie, and that is think before you click that button on the camera. It's a fine delicate line we need to walk.

[Village Idiot]

Oh... And I would have to say that this is a little conceded...

Conceited?

[tsaraleksi]

I think it's an abuse if you want to call it that. I say so because you didn't really capture what you "saw". I doubt if you enter such a picture into a contest, that it would be allowed. Now of course, you could set it up in such a manner that the man was actually walking by the road....

As to the OP, I guess, the only comment I have is for the newbies to get as much correct in camera as they can. I see no joy in spending countless hours in front of a computer when you could use those times to practice photography skills.

Personally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with what was done here. If LaFoto hadn't mentioned that the guy was moved, I would have never noticed. Since it was mentioned, it's easy to spot where he was cloned. In the end, all that matters is the end result, the final image. I would never have made a second glance at the original photograph that LaFoto described, since having the man on the same side as the tree wouldn't have looked very good. This way, it's at least an interesting photo.

Whether it would be allowed into a competition isn't really the point. Every photo competition has different rules, and even categories. If LaFoto had taken a couple more minutes with the PP, you would likely never be able to tell the man was moved.

That's not the point. He posted the photo asking if we think by moving the person whether or not that would constitute an abuse. To me, this type of photograph is supposed to tell a story. Something along the line of "while on a bus, I saw the man walking alone along the road, and it made me think of solitude and I took the photo". If you have to go to this degree and force the photo, then it lost it's mystique, and there would be no sense of connection to the scene.

Now, I think it's ok to use Photoshop for such thing as making colors pop, smoothing someone's skin for instance, but I would never recommend it to a newbie as a mean to correction a composition. I see quite a few C&C where a newbie is advised to clone out, say, a branch sticking out from someone's head. The problem with such an advise is that it does not convey the proper message to the newbie, and that is think before you click that button on the camera. It's a fine delicate line we need to walk.

That's a really pointless and narrow minded way to look at the situation. Sure, if it was being presented as a journalistic or narrative image (this is what happened on my trip.... ) then it's an abuse because moving the guy is not being honest to the scene. But if the intent was to create an image that the photographer found pleasing, or perhaps evoke a specific mood, then what difference does it make?

[ghpham]

Personally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with what was done here. If LaFoto hadn't mentioned that the guy was moved, I would have never noticed. Since it was mentioned, it's easy to spot where he was cloned. In the end, all that matters is the end result, the final image. I would never have made a second glance at the original photograph that LaFoto described, since having the man on the same side as the tree wouldn't have looked very good. This way, it's at least an interesting photo.

Whether it would be allowed into a competition isn't really the point. Every photo competition has different rules, and even categories. If LaFoto had taken a couple more minutes with the PP, you would likely never be able to tell the man was moved.

That's not the point. He posted the photo asking if we think by moving the person whether or not that would constitute an abuse. To me, this type of photograph is supposed to tell a story. Something along the line of "while on a bus, I saw the man walking alone along the road, and it made me think of solitude and I took the photo". If you have to go to this degree and force the photo, then it lost it's mystique, and there would be no sense of connection to the scene.

Now, I think it's ok to use Photoshop for such thing as making colors pop, smoothing someone's skin for instance, but I would never recommend it to a newbie as a mean to correction a composition. I see quite a few C&C where a newbie is advised to clone out, say, a branch sticking out from someone's head. The problem with such an advise is that it does not convey the proper message to the newbie, and that is think before you click that button on the camera. It's a fine delicate line we need to walk.

That's a really pointless and narrow minded way to look at the situation. Sure, if it was being presented as a journalistic or narrative image (this is what happened on my trip.... ) then it's an abuse because moving the guy is not being honest to the scene. But if the intent was to create an image that the photographer found pleasing, or perhaps evoke a specific mood, then what difference does it make?

Narrow minded?? if the point was not to tell a story, then why bother moving the person?

[tsaraleksi]

That's not the point. He posted the photo asking if we think by moving the person whether or not that would constitute an abuse. To me, this type of photograph is supposed to tell a story. Something along the line of "while on a bus, I saw the man walking alone along the road, and it made me think of solitude and I took the photo". If you have to go to this degree and force the photo, then it lost it's mystique, and there would be no sense of connection to the scene.

Now, I think it's ok to use Photoshop for such thing as making colors pop, smoothing someone's skin for instance, but I would never recommend it to a newbie as a mean to correction a composition. I see quite a few C&C where a newbie is advised to clone out, say, a branch sticking out from someone's head. The problem with such an advise is that it does not convey the proper message to the newbie, and that is think before you click that button on the camera. It's a fine delicate line we need to walk.

That's a really pointless and narrow minded way to look at the situation. Sure, if it was being presented as a journalistic or narrative image (this is what happened on my trip.... ) then it's an abuse because moving the guy is not being honest to the scene. But if the intent was to create an image that the photographer found pleasing, or perhaps evoke a specific mood, then what difference does it make?

Narrow minded?? if the point was not to tell a story, then why bother moving the person?

Because it makes a better image?

And at the end of the day, a better image is all that matters. You keep repeating that it's abuse, that it's wrong, and unacceptable. But you can't seem to articulate why.

[ghpham]

That's a really pointless and narrow minded way to look at the situation. Sure, if it was being presented as a journalistic or narrative image (this is what happened on my trip.... ) then it's an abuse because moving the guy is not being honest to the scene. But if the intent was to create an image that the photographer found pleasing, or perhaps evoke a specific mood, then what difference does it make?

Narrow minded?? if the point was not to tell a story, then why bother moving the person?

Because it makes a better image?

And at the end of the day, a better image is all that matters. You keep repeating that it's abuse, that it's wrong, and unacceptable. But you can't seem to articulate why.

I already told you why but you don't seem to want to understand. The whole point is that he wanted to convey a sense of solitude, to tell a story (photojournalistic?). The man was not under the tree, so he decide to move the man. That is not what he actually observed. Presenting to an audience as such is not being truthful.

[tsaraleksi]

Narrow minded?? if the point was not to tell a story, then why bother moving the person?

Because it makes a better image?

And at the end of the day, a better image is all that matters. You keep repeating that it's abuse, that it's wrong, and unacceptable. But you can't seem to articulate why.

I already told you why but you don't seem to want to understand. The whole point is that he wanted to convey a sense of solitude, to tell a story (photojournalistic?). The man was not under the tree, so he decide to move the man. That is not what he actually observed. Presenting to an audience as such is not being truthful.

If he was taking the picture with intent of claiming that the scene was exactly as photographed, then yes, it is absolutely untruthful. But no where does he make that claim.

You're making a really broad assumption that photographs are truthful so long as they were not digitally manipulated. Would it have been acceptable if he had gone to the man and asked him to move to a different spot? In that case, the image accurately records the scene, but the photographer has acted to change the scene.

Were LAphoto documenting the scene as a journalist, both options would be unacceptable, because the rules are built around changing the scene, not around digital manipulation.

But I find it very difficult to fault someone for the second option in any other circumstance, and if you can't find fault in the second, the first is just another way to handle the same task.

Without question, learning how to get as much right in camera as possible is a critical aspect of learning to be a photographer. But that fact does not make digital manipulation wrong as a rule.