On 6/22/2011 7:38 PM, Gary wrote:
>
>
> On another forum some time ago someone boldly stated that Ansel Adams
> would never, ever use a digital camera and manipulate the image.
>
> Since Ansel sometimes spent hours, dodging/burning, etc in the darkroom,
> manipulating his images my thought is that if he were here today he
> would have biggest, baddest, largest, honkinest computer with Photoshop
> and every other plugin to wring out every last pixel from his images and
> then print them with the best inks and printers in a color managed
> environment.
Absolutely...and that's what bugs me so much about the current
"anti-Photoshop" attitude.
First off, "Photoshop" has, in its current usage, become a generic term
that means any post-processing rather than a specific piece of software
and the effects that can be obtained only by that software. I once read
someone on another forum talking about how it wasn't true that he
"Photoshopped" his images, because he did almost everything in ACR. Big
deal -- you are more than capable of making a totally surreal image by
playing with the ACR sliders. Similarly, I rarely if ever use
Photoshop...but I certainly post-process my images with Lightroom, which
can perform most if not all of the post-processing functions most people
would ever need. The problem is, in the popular mind, "Photoshop" has
taken on some sort of nefarious magical powers. Just as some
high-school teachers in the early '80s wouldn't let students write their
papers on their computers using a word-processing program because they
were convinced that said program actually made the computer write the
student's paper from scratch, so many people seem to think that using
Photoshop on an shot automagically turns it from a mundane image into a
spectacular one (as if they took the "auto-enhance" function a bit too
literally). Therefore, "Photoshopping" an image becomes a mark of
dishonor, even though it's merely the digital version of the sort of
post-processing people routinely did in darkrooms (not to mention the
use of filters and particular film stocks in the field itself) during
the days of film.
And that's what annoyed me a bit about the video clip on Jeffrey
Murray's website. Personally, I will say that many of the images on Mr.
Murray's website certainly look like they've been subject to a degree of
post-processing (I'm particularly thinking of the extraordinarily-pure
blues and purples found on distant mountains and clouds in some of his
top images, colors which can be easily duplicated by turning up the
"vibrance" control in ACR or Lightroom). I'm not saying that Mr. Murray
is definitely doing such processing (or "Photoshopping"), but, whatever
may be the case, he's doing something with either filtration, camera
settings, or post-processing that leads to the exact same
"super-natural" results. But, by reinforcing the
obviously-not-a-photographer interviewer's "ain't it awful?" attitude
toward "Photoshop," he helps buttress the myth that it is somehow
dishonest to tune one's images with standard digital post-processing
techniques, and that "real photographers" would never stoop to such
"cheating," with the concomitant assumption that said "real
photographers" get everything so perfect in-camera that their images are
straight RAW captures with all the ACR sliders set to zero.
I wrote an article touching on the subject for my website
(http://ravenfallsphotography.com/articles/colorsaturation.htm) and
stand by most of what I wrote there. I would also repeat the challenge:
if someone wants to assert that they really don't "Photoshop" their
images, they should be willing to post the results of a straight Adobe
Camera Raw conversion of a given image, without changing any of the
sliders in ACR, and let us see just exactly whether that conversion and
the image as advertised on their website or sold at art shows look
exactly the same.
--
|-----------------------------
|James David Walley
|-----------------------------
|Raven Falls Photography
|www.ravenfallsphotography.com
|-----------------------------
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