Photoshop or not

[Michael Lloyd]

This debate is probably happening on numerous other forums as I type this. For me it's not a debate... just a fact of being a photographer.

Is photoshop a tool or a device sent to earth by Satan to punish film photographers that switch to digital? :p
There are some "purists" out there that say that manipulating an image with photoshop has nothing to do with photography. In fact it takes away from the photograph.

My thoughts on the matter are quoted below from a reply that I made this morning on my "home" forum (not dissin BPN. I love this place. TPF is where I first mixed photography and forums and I've got a lot of friends there).

If you shoot JPG the camera adjusts your image data for you. If you shoot raw you need to adjust your image data and save it to a format that can be viewed by others easily and printed.

Typically the negative side of this debate is stirred by someone with a lot of film experience (note that I didn't say darkroom) and that is relatively new to digital photography. They hold on to some kind of misguided ideal that somehow film is better than digital. That's no different than saying "my camera took a really nice picture.

"Once you alter the image using something other than light, you are doing graphic arts, not photography"

:cool: The image is light. It was created with light. It was painted on your eye with light. It was modified in the place it exists by light. Photography is a recording of light and the subtle differences in hue, contrast, and saturation across a very narrow electromagnetic spectrum. Light is recorded by a sensor or the negative. It's transferred from the negative to the positive with light. It's transferred from the sensor to the memory card and on to the computer with electromagnetic energy, which is just another form of what we call light. The entire process, no matter which one you choose, is about light.

If you want to be a purist about photography, buy a bunch of darkroom equipment and go back to shooting film. Don't tell anyone but you'll be manipulating the image there. If you don't you may as well get your prints done at Walmart

I would surmise that they have little to no darkroom experience otherwise they wouldn't speak negatively about "manipulating" an image.

[Richard Peters]

If you want to be a purist about photography, buy a bunch of darkroom equipment and go back to shooting film. Don't tell anyone but you'll be manipulating the image there. If you don't you may as well get your prints done at Walmart.

Well said. ALL forms of photography pretty much involve some form of processing!

[John Chardine]

"Typically the negative side of this debate is stirred by someone with a lot of film experience"

Michael- I would go further and say slide-film experience. Slides were shot by many who never set foot in a darkroom, and the creative path for them ended when the shutter release was actuated (I'm ignoring Cybachromes and inter-negs etc). With this in mind you can see where this narrow-mindedness about post-processing comes from. What these people don't realise is that slides were only one form of film medium, albeit a dominant form in the years before digital kicked in. The overwhelming trend in photography over its long history was one of exposing film, developing the negative, and making a print, which is more or less what we do now in digital.

[Jim Buescher]

The instant the light passes through the elements of the lens the image is manipulated, film or digital. wide angle and telephoto distort the perspective in different ways. Then comes the film.. different films have different characteristics as far as grain, hue and saturation, so the image is manipulated depending on your choice of film, not to mention filters. So whether we shoot film or digital and no matter how "pure" we try to keep it, reality will always be manipulated in some way.

[Don Lacy]

I remember the first time I viewed Velvia slides and thinking wow what a wonderful sunset I didn't think the sky had that much color in it:)

[Roger Clark]

I remember the first time I viewed Velvia slides and thinking wow what a wonderful sunset I didn't think the sky had that much color in it:)

It didn't! ;)

Love that velvia! Try, for old times sake using velvia along side a digital. Then try and manipulate the digital to match the velvia. It's tough and one needs to stretch the digital camera image a long way to get it close to the contrast and saturation of velvia.

The bottom line is that most images captured must have the dynamic range compressed/manipulated to fit within the constraints of output media, whether paper, or screen. Manipulation is/was done by the film, the developer, the print paper, the print developer, not including dodging and burning in the darkroom. Digital image manipulation programs have only brought that manipulation to a wider audience, but it is not anything more than has been done for many decades, and in many cases, users do less now than velvia and other saturated films ever did.

Roger

[Roman Kurywczak]

Remember too that I made many choice pre-processing.....warming filters, red for B&W, enhancing filters to pop sunrises and sunsets, and nobody ever complains about a circular polariser or grad ND (well....at least I don't!)......this is manipulation!!!

[Bill McCrystyn]

After a couple years with my Spotmatic I realized that a better job could be done at a custom lab than at the little yellow drive-up hut and so I got my first Cibacrome print, one of the first available. Lab people asked me questions about cropping, burning in, and all kinds of things. They were making "suggestions" about how to shoot stuff. What world was this? How long had this been going on? Wow, I bought my first A1. :)

[Glenn Forbes]

I would have to agree with Jim Buescher’s assessment. It’s all manipulation. The question is how much is acceptable? The eye sees a much wider range than the camera can capture, so it seems a given that we would want to alter the image look as natural as the eye sees it. Some people think this is a license to enhance the image way beyond what is natural. Adding content or over-saturating the image is where I draw the line.

[Bill McCrystyn]

That's another subject entirely called "artistic lisence". It ranges from Norman Rockwell to Picasso. OOTB and beyond into the twilight zone. As long as the artist calls and represents an image correctly it should/can be judged for what it is and accepted or rejected by the viewer - as long as they are honest.

[Christopher C.M. Cooke]

Yes I agree Photoshop is cheating on a massive scale (as I wrap my 200 Ambico filters up for storage) The hours spent learning at the feet of B/W and Colour Film Photographers learning the art of develoing film (Pushing the film and developing fluids) heating or cooling the Darkroom. The fun you could have making various prints from the same negative not to mention the strain of continually working in "natural" red light.

The only things I miss are my Kodachrome colour slids and though an amazing film you needed a university degree to process it but I still have thousands of Kodachrome slides many many years old and still in perfect condition for when I can afford a scanner that will do them justice, each slide contains approx 30MB of infomation. Not many know that Kodachrome was designed by two musicians.

Technology is a wonderful thing as is nostalgia and I stilll have all my old film cameras, Canon A1, F1, AE1, Leicas, Hasselblads, Rolleiflexes, Nikon F2as Photomic, F3, three Nikonos U/W systems all practically worthless but everyone with memories attached and many hours of overtime invested in them. How do they compare with my 1DMKIII and 5DMKII, they do not, never did, never will and I enjoy using my limited PP skills much more than the hundreds of hours spent in cold or hot darkrooms often with friends of dubious sexuality.

[Michael Lloyd]

:D

I still hold on to my (withering) film roots... I take my Hasselblads with me most of the time. I don't use them... but I take them with me :D Actually that's not true... I shot a frame of B&W a few weeks ago. I have quite a few more to go before it's time to replace the roll. One of these days, I'm going to take my Linhoff Master Technika with me... I probably won't use it... :) but it will be there just in case. And if/when I finally use up a roll or expose a sheet of film again... I'll send it to someone and have it developed / printed because I don't have a darkroom. But I do have a Lightroom ba doomp domp cha-ching... ...elvis voice on...thank you, thank you very much... I'll be here all night ...elvis voice off...

For me the switch to digital has progressed from "wow! I can shoot like crazy and fix it later" to "take my time, shoot whenever I can (even when I might not have shot with film), use techniques that I abandoned when I switched (like graduated ND's (thanks Roman)), and try to make each shot the best that it can be. It might not be the best shot (maybe the light is bad? maybe there's a twig in the way? maybe her smile isn't right? Maybe he didn't catch the ball? etc) but it's a moment captured that will never be repeated and it can probably be made a little better in the digital darkroom.

[Dave Mills]

The fact is were in a new age which opens up more possibilities than ever before. We now have the ability to expand our creative talents and create an image to our own tastes. As in fine art...let the viewer decide..

[jimknoy]

I agree that Photoshop can lend one to "over do it", but I also agree that pre-digital work was manipulation too. I used Kodachrome in some places, Ektachrome in others, filters etc. It is a matter of degree. I try to match what I think I remembered the shot looked like and to get a product that gives me the same excited feeling I had when I took the shot. The features with digital are amazing and wonderful and I will never go back to slides nor go back to doing wet print enlargements. But I DO miss Kodachrome. Especially when I look at some shots from Byrce Canyon. I must say that I have never been able to capture that kind of picture on digital, such rich colors etc. The fact that I was able to get a very nice picture on slides with a relatively short amount of learning time v. the time it takes to learn Photoshop says something.

[Paul Granone]

You do not have to alter images in Photoshop if you do not want to.

I use Photoshop CS 4 for the excellent Adobe Camera Raw V5 RAW converter.