There’s an interesting discussion going on Nikon Digital Learning Center group at Flickr about digital post processing, not photo manipulation, and how it could lead to the end of professionalism, due to the fact that tools like Photoshop, Gimp or Lightroom make post processing much too easy.
While some people are trying to sell their photoshopped photos as taken straight from the memory card, which indeed is wrong, others really are becoming just minimal photoshop purists or even no digital manipulation at all and only lab processing is good fundamentalists. But what really is a pure and untouched photo?
Post processing is as old as photography, the difference is, until know, it was done just by a few people, because not all photographers could really master the lab, and plenty of adjustments can be done in there (and even techniques like cross processing). But nowadays everybody can use their favorite software (even online) to do the same thing, and the funny thing is the same people who did lab processing in the film days, or had someone to do it for them, are those who now are pointing the finger towards digital processing.
The photo medium itself has a fair share of limitations: there isn’t just one kind of film and you have to choose between the obvious B&W or Color to other features like the color temperature or film grain. All of this means the captured photo already is a distorted image, because in nature there are no such things like film grain. The applies to the sensors in digital cameras, which doesn’t react to light the same way the human eye does: extreme post processing like HDR sometimes is not that extreme because current technology has a smaller range than the human eye.
Even a lens can manipulate a photo, in the SLR world a 50mm (or 35mm for digital cameras) is regarded as the lens with human eye’s perspective, which means that every other focal length is in fact distorting reality. Another fine example of lenses distorting reality is lomography, where one of the coolest things is the extremely saturated colors due to the poor quality of the optic elements that were used.
It’s easy to find an example of how a photo is a distorted view of reality, which makes much harder to mark the frontier of “too much post processed” photos. Overall I have no problem with tools like Photoshop or Gimp, because that’s what they are: tools, just like a lens or a tripod. Almost every photo I upload to Flickr had some kind of digital post processing, even if only minor adjustments in levels, curves or contrast . And the fact is: Photoshop can only turn a bad photo into a slightly less bad photo, but rarely a really good one.
Technorati Tags: nikon, post processing, hdr, photoshop, flickr, lomo, lomography, lightroom, gimp, hdr, cross processing
