Digital Manipulation...how far do you go ?

[David Freeman Photography]

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Just a question to everyone..

 

I have been looking on the Leica LFI Gallery recently and probably 20% of the images have been butchered in some sort of Photoshop, instagram app ...

 

Are we losing sight of what a real image should like like in this day and age and how much time do YOU spend on a digital image on you PC/MAC etc...

 

Having owned my Leica m9P now for 2 months , I am so happy with the images straight off camera , apart from BW conversion...that's it..

[Paul J]

I don't like to manipulate an image in the sense of physically taking elements out. I would always without a doubt prefer to get it right in camera. I really enjoy that challenge. I dislike photoshop filters and plug ins, generally. I do make composites in my paid work though. I also like montages. But I used to do these by cutting up prints and rephotographing them too.

 

Colour and tonality is another thing and in the same way of chosing a film stock or dodging and burning in the darkroom I love it. I don't do it to EVERY image. I don't do it to any image for the sake of it. Each image is treated individually. I have a certain colour palette and tonality that I'm compelled by though.

 

I have spent two weeks retouching one image commercially.

 

So no, I don't have a problem with it at all. Wether it's done tastefully or not is a whole other thing. I only like it when it doesn't look like there has had any done - but that is generally what takes longer.

 

I don't believe it makes it any less of a photograph at all. I do think it's too easy to go too far though. I never doa whole photo in one sitting. Always do some, stop and do something else (usually come on this forum!) then come back to it. Sometimes retouching 10 shots incrementally at once.

 

Lastly all this talk of retouching as being a modern curse...it has been going on long before computers and was in some ways a lot harder. That's a whole other story. Here is one example of Avedon's printer instructions.

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[sanyasi]

Just a question to everyone..

 

Having owned my Leica m9P now for 2 months , I am so happy with the images straight off camera , apart from BW conversion...that's it..

 

You have answered your own question. If you are happy with your own images, that is all that counts.

 

Digital post processing is just another tool. I think it is best used sparingly once you have made the basic adjustments that are required of digital files, but part of the fun for me is to occasionally experiment. One thing is clear: The underlying photograph (composition and exposure) have to be good. No amount of the post processing is going to turn a loser into a winner.

 

Personally, I don't have any trouble adjusting the sky's tone, but I do find it a bit ridiculous to replace the sky one from another photo. Maybe that's because I don't have the patience or talent to do it well.

 

I do find using real filters much more interesting and satisfying than digital filters. Its a roots thing.

[chalkdust]

Indeed it is a "roots thing." I learned photography from my father and from my boos in my first job, a photo lab at college in the early '70s. My father shot entirely 35mm slides. So his idea of post processing was slide sorting. He had to get the shot right in the camera.

 

My photo lab job included B & W darkroom processing and printing. In the darkroom I could adjust exposure, and contrast, and I could crop.

 

Consequently, exposure, contest, and cropping with an occasional dodge or burn is all of the adjusting I prefer to do with my digital images.

 

I do not enjoy the majority of "unrealistic" processed images I see in galleries and magazines today. But that is only my taste. I admit that I do not have the skills to produce those images that I call "unrealistic."

[tobey bilek]

The M9 image straight from the camera even as a DNG, are the most perfect files I have yet to see from a digital camera. So the answer is very little if anything if the exposure was perfect , subject well lighted, and within contrast range. The M9 is simply amazing.

 

The M8 files are another story. I have set up a custom WB from whibal card under the same condition & time as my M9. The lenses on the M8 are all filtered and coded, yet the files look unfinished. With manipulation, I can get them to look the same as M9 files. Blues seem off significantly with a cyan cast.

 

I was reading a site this week comparing the Nikon D800 with the S2. The S2 had the same issues as my M8.

 

I have 5 Nikons including a D3 and D700, and the raw files can look nice from the camera, usually they require some curves or other correction to make them look correct or best even if I use Nikon software NX2 or profile neutral, camera standard, portrait, or other profile in ACR.

[250swb]

Up until recently, with the introduction of digital imaging, the vast majority of images made in a darkroom by serious amatuers and professionals would have had some sort of manipulation done to them to render them perfect in the eyes of the photographer. But digital files have made people lazy.

 

I think if you are happy with what comes out of any digital camera, and can't see some way to improve it, you aren't working hard enough. It may be darkening a tone here, or lightening a tone there, but c'mon on, its your photograph so see the image how you want to see it, not leave it to some guy in Solms who programmed the camera.

 

Steve

[David Freeman Photography]

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The M9 image straight from the camera even as a DNG, are the most perfect files I have yet to see from a digital camera. So the answer is very little if anything if the exposure was perfect , subject well lighted, and within contrast range. The M9 is simply amazing.

 

The M8 files are another story. I have set up a custom WB from whibal card under the same condition & time as my M9. The lenses on the M8 are all filtered and coded, yet the files look unfinished. With manipulation, I can get them to look the same as M9 files. Blues seem off significantly with a cyan cast.

 

I was reading a site this week comparing the Nikon D800 with the S2. The S2 had the same issues as my M8.

 

I have 5 Nikons including a D3 and D700, and the raw files can look nice from the camera, usually they require some curves or other correction to make them look correct or best even if I use Nikon software NX2 or profile neutral, camera standard, portrait, or other profile in ACR.

 

 

I agree with you..the M9 straight from camera are superb..just interested in finding out what Leica Users do with their images from the camera's..

[250swb]

I agree with you..the M9 straight from camera are superb..just interested in finding out what Leica Users do with their images from the camera's..

 

We will never know if your idea of perfection matches anybody else's if you don't post something in the Photo Forum

 

Steve

[wda]

Just a question to everyone..

 

I have been looking on the Leica LFI Gallery recently and probably 20% of the images have been butchered in some sort of Photoshop, ....

"butchered" is quite a strong word which implies rather more processing than the average photographer would consider desirable. Lightroom enables me to make the sort of corrections alluded to in Avedon's picture shown above, with relative ease and conviction.

 

I always try to preserve the 'truth' in my pictures, but do not see a problem in 'massaging' tones, where necessary, to lead a viewer to see what I wanted that viewer to notice. Transplanting features between pictures is a rather different ball-game which I have avoided thus far.

[Ecar]

Transplanting features between pictures is a rather different ball-game which I have avoided thus far.

+1.

Although I admit to using the clone tool to remove undesired details more frequently than I perhaps should.

[adan]

First - always remember it didn't start with PhotoShop and digital: Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (Metropolitan Museum of Art): Mia Fineman: 9780300185010: Amazon.com: Books

 

Second - the standards are situational.

 

I love the heavily manipulated film-and-paper creations of, say, Jerry Uelsmann: Jerry Uelsmann : Works But I would never award him a Pulitzer prize - the standards for reporting are different than for art (or advertising).

 

For me, what was in front of the lens is sacrosanct - sort of.

 

I wouldn't physically rearrange things in a room (say, move an ugly soda-pop can) before taking a picture, or clone it off the table afterwards. But I might well rearrange my position or change lenses when taking the picture (cropping in the camera) or crop it afterwards so that the soda can doesn't fall within the borders of the picture. Unless, of course, the soda can is part of telling the story, establishing personality or environment accurately.

 

Is there a difference between removing something by cropping; or by cloning or by moving it before the exposure? I think so, and photojournalists have been fired for doing the second and third, but not the first. But it's a question that has to be considered again and again in every new situation.

 

Choosing film changes the way a photograph records reality: Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Velvia, C-41, tungsten, daylight, Tri-X, Delta 3200, color infrared, B&W infrared. If National Geographic or NASA use false-color infrared Landsat images to make a journalistic or scientific point, have they manipulated the picture?

 

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/386902main_false_natural_lg.jpg

 

So I feel comfortable changing, for example, overall saturation in an image, if it falls within the range of what I could have gotten simply by using a different film.

 

Movie-type effects like the cross-processed look, low-saturation or selective desaturation fall outside what is acceptable (to me) for documentary journalism - but are fine for entertainment, ads, art, and even certain kinds of quote-journalism-unquote, such as a food section illustration or fashion shoot.

 

One can ask if, once it became easy to record the world in its "natural color" - whether leaving out color is itself a manipulation. Whether by shooting Tri-X or an M Monochrom, or by desaturating in Photoshop. Very few people (absent zombies) have gray skin - is it a lie to depict them that way?

 

For the most part, I feel comfortable doing things I could have done with one negative in one enlarger, one piece of paper and more or less one exposure (no movement of the negative between different exposures) - like Paul's Avedon sample above. Dodge, burn, set the edges with a cropping easel, spot out artifacts like dust, hot pixels, whatever. Gene Smith used to print through a black nylon stocking in order to soften and reduce "grain."

 

Back in the silver-print days, I used to always question each dust speck when spotting. Is this just dust, or something that was really there? And will someone looking at the picture later see it as part of the subject, or just think I was a sloppy spotter?

 

Anyway, I have a couple of concrete examples from a current project to show after a little more work - I'll be back.

[adan]

As promised - or threatened

 

My next ColoradoSeen will be a "one year of Occupy Denver" special issue. In preparing it I decided to include a formal portrait series as well as the unposed reportage pictures. Accordingly, I took a portable studio "on location" to a demonstration. The set up was designed so that I could blow the background to white by transillumination with sunlight, WITHOUT photoshop manipulation or green-screening or some such - see first image.

 

So - OK. Is is manipulation to ask people to pose? Is it manipulation to import an artificial backdrop? Is it manipulation to arrange the lighting and exposure so that the background is blown out (whether by the sun, or by powerful studio strobes)?

 

The portrait series was originally intended to be B&W (although I am rethinking that.) Is it manipulation to delete the color? And by which method - playing with channels to change how the colors render in gray, or simply converting to L*a*b* and grabbing the L channel, or other approaches?

 

The backdrop blew around a little in the breeze, and as we know, Leica M pictures, compared to the framelines, can be a little "loose." So in some shots the edge of the white background shows up. I think it would be a mistake - journalistically - to clone out the overshoot areas. But what about cropping them out (and correcting camera tilt, and formatting for my magazine page shape, at the same time)?

 

I'm always asking myself, is such-and-such a change honest, both in depicting the subject, and in representing my skills as a photographer (as opposed to a photoshop artist)?

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[adan]

Another example - in the first picture above, recording my portable studio, the plaza is mostly empty. The demonstration at that time was a handful of people over on the right.

 

A few minutes later, I moved in closer, cropped the scene in-camera with a 90mm lens, and then cropped the image AGAIN to include only what the 90 framelines showed.

 

Same situation - but a picture in which the demonstrators predominate instead of filling just a tiny corner of the plaza.

 

Perhaps a bit far afield from the original question of digital manipulation - I didn't clone in any extra people or substantially alter tones. But in a larger sense, photography has alway been about editing reality - including or leaving out things. So long as we take 2D rectangular pictures of a 3D spherical universe, that will always be the case

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[c.poulton]

........photography has alway been about editing reality......

 

Very interesting and thought provoking series of posts,adan.

 

It's certainly a difficult and complicated issue.

 

Personally I dislike image manipulation with MY OWN images, and perhaps lean a little too far towards that photo journalistic, reportage ideal of 'truth' where the 'camera never lies', although we all know this is patently false!

 

My feelings towards digital (or darkroom?) image manipulation have changed over the years - I certainly don't mind it anymore, even cloning out objects and transposing sky's, however what I really object to is when manipulation is used but not acknowledged, portraying a falsehood as truth!

 

An example - I'm an architect by profession and we regularly commission architectural photographers to shoot our completed buildings. One photographer freely admits to cloning out 'problematic ' items such as builders tools, ladders, wires, street lights, cars, people etc. He also adds in people (or clones them) if required to complete an image.

 

Now I know there has always been quite a bit of artistic license used in architectural photography, but these images are not labeled or noted as having been manipulated so anyone looking at them without prior knowledge would consider them as a true representation of reality!

 

It's hard to know where to draw the line - artistic, advertising, fashion photography, it's kind of a assumed that some form of manipulation has been used, everyone is used to this, it's when you get to the other genres where the problems lie.

 

What really worries me is that with Photoshop (et al) it's so easy to manipulate that it's done almost as second nature - and people now assume that all images have been 'photoshopped' to some extent and this is of concern to me.

 

 

Christian