Do you consider post production cheating?
Saturday, May 29th, 2010Most photos today are edited. Colours are saturated, exposure altered and items erased from a picture completely. And you can turn a boring picture into a great picture with just a few clicks of the button.
I recently started picniking my pics and have seen some great results and big differences between the edited and original. Just by a little bit of cropping and intensifying the colours slightly.
But do you think it’s cheating a little bit? How were brilliant pictures taken before photoshop, picnik and gimp?
Well your first sentence "Most photos today are edited" implies that post processing started with the advent of digital.
As most of the other answers say, that is simply not true. The vast majority (if not all) of the common tweaks in exposure (dodging & burning) and retouching have been done since the advent of photography!
Even HDR type exposure blending was done as early as the 1930’s (although the idea had been mooted in the 1850’s).
You also need to realise that the camera cannot capture what you can see - it just doesn’t have the ability of the combination of human eye & brain. Quite often I hear ’snapshot’ photographers looking at a scene they shot straight out of camera saying that it doesn’t look like they saw it (ie their eye saw it in more detail or with more colour/contrast). Hence then the need to try to get the post processing to better emulate what your eye saw.
Then there’s the artistic,creative side of photography (ie ‘making’ pictures, rather than ‘taking’ pictures) such as adding/removing elements of a scene which enhances the final image. Again if your intent is to create a particular scene or mood, then what of it? Only in ‘record’ photography is it strictly necessary to record, without adjustment, the scene. This again comes back to the purpose and intent of the photographer - to merely ‘capture’ a scene or to create a scene.
As far as glamour/fashion/celebrity photography goes, there has again always been a trend for photo retouching. All that happens now is that it’s done on computer rather than having to huddle in a dark room breathing chemicals. Although I do feel nostalgic when I get a whiff of fixer (!) I much prefer to sit in comfort & edit!
Having said all that though (phew!) Perki88 is spot on - a good photographer gets the basics right in camera - and a poor image will always be a poor image, Photoshop or not.