To post-process or not to post-process

[Anbaric]

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It depends what kind of photographer you want to be, and exactly what you'd like to achieve. There's a whole spectrum between digital art, where the image is just viewed as raw material that can be manipulated in any way the artist sees fit, to journalism, where there are strict constraints on what is permitted. Some photographers choose to impose such constraints on themselves, many do not. As it happens, most of my pictures would probably comply with what journalists are allowed to do:

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/contest/2023/verification-process/what-counts-as-manipulation

i.e., cropping and reasonable adjustments of colour and brightness and contrast, with nothing larger than a dust spot cloned out. But that's just a personal preference, because I'm not shooting for news organisations or entering competitions.

Edited March 24, 2023 by Anbaric

[marchyman]

On 3/21/2023 at 9:14 AM, SOLA said:

The image is what it is and the quality of what you capture shows what you and your camera can do.

That's not how it has been for many of the iconic images of the past.  Take a look at the darkroom machinations performed by Pablo Inirio https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-iconic-prints-edited-darkroom/ to get the desired look.

In the case of digital images the result is what the software in the camera does (jpeg output) vs what the software of your raw developer does.   Then add in your personal touches.  If you shoot raw you'll get different interpretations of "what your camera can do" depending upon the raw conversion software does.   "Unedited" Lightroom output will look different from Capture One output, etc.

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[roydonian]

As Anabaric says, there's a whole spectrum between digital art and journalism. So the difference between Jaapv's viewpoint and mine is probably that I see the camera primarily as a recording instrument - the visual equivalent to the little pocket audio recorder I'd take to interviews and press conferences. One device records visual scenes, the other records sounds.

I don't have any sort of artistic "vision", but photograph what I want to record, whether it's a street scene in Venice, an old dog asleep at my feet, or a new radar antenna at a trade show. In many cases, physical reality may largely dictate not only where I have to stand in order to record the scene, but also the moment for pressing the button.

Looking through what could be termed popular photo magazines, I've come to the conclusion that many of today's photographers seem over-addicted to Photoshop's saturation, vibrance, and clarity sliders. A photo that I was looking at earlier today seemed positively eyeball-searing until loaded into Photoshop and having its vibrance reduced by -50. Then it started to look like a real-world scene rather than something recorded using a psychedelic version of 1940s Technicolor.

My post-processing is largely confined to straightening the horizon, making the proportions of the final image fit the scene, and adjusting the exposure and white balance if either needs altering. The only regular retouching that I do in Photoshop is to deal with dust, but on pics taken for pleasure (such as those for an article I wrote for the LHSA's 'Viewfinder' magazine during the UK's 2021 anti-Covid lockdown), graffiti, litter, 'wheelie-bins', and ugly advertising signs will be banished.

[250swb]

On 3/24/2023 at 8:29 PM, roydonian said:

 

Looking through what could be termed popular photo magazines, I've come to the conclusion that many of today's photographers seem over-addicted to Photoshop's saturation, vibrance, and clarity sliders. A photo that I was looking at earlier today seemed positively eyeball-searing until loaded into Photoshop and having its vibrance reduced by -50. Then it started to look like a real-world scene rather than something recorded using a psychedelic version of 1940s Technicolor.

 

And yet a negative from Ansel Adams, or Edward Weston, Robert Frank, HCB, or even Fox Talbot has never represented the final interpretation in the print has it? Stuff happened in the darkroom where the photographer had their own opinion about the negative.

But now we have software writers dictating how an image comes out, and while many people can get it wrong in Photoshop at the very least they are free to have their own opinion in doing so. The idea that the modern digital photographer is somehow pure and skilled if they do nothing to improve their photo in post processing ignores the fact that somebody else sitting at a desk at Leica did have that opinion for you, right or wrong. Somebody you never met, somebody writing firmware to appeal to the lowest common denominator. That isn't a standard, it is a surrender.

[Viv]

As far as I am concerned, a little processing goes a long way.

Minor exposure correction, minor hue adjustment, cropping. That's about it.

[hansvons]

@250swb precisely my sentiment. I dislike the long tinkering with images that lead to eye fatigue earlier than later. The result are over-sexed images that don’t last time. I solved that with a custom camera ICC profile for C1, which I based on Kodak’s print film 2383, but stripped the colour part in the matrix because I like what Leica offers. 
 

Now my images show roughly the right contrast, saturation, and colour. Still, I can adjust anything if needed, which mostly is temperature and exposure. Sometimes I bring back highlights or open up the shadows a tad or adjust levels.

[wda]

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I agree with Viv. Minor tweaking can often transform an indifferent image, quite quickly. 

[leica dream]

I'm with the originator, Sola, on this one although I am going in the reverse direction from digital back to film.

It is all a matter of personal taste and what personal challenge the photographer seeks to achieve. There has to be a place be it for tweaking with software or aiming for perfection (whatever target that is for any individual) as shot.  The problem for me these days is that one can never believe an image because so many techniques enable overlay and doctoring of several images into one. For some that is the aim of creative image making and their challenge is to achieve what to them is an aesthetic mix - rather like a painting artist is with abstracts or some of those (to me) wierd physical structures which appear in galleries.

Although I do use Capture One occasionally when a result of a particularly desired subject is not quite to my satisfaction, my personal aim is to get what I want as shot out of the camera. Generally, if I cannot do that I have failed and therefore completely missed the moment I was trying to capture.

[roydonian]

On 3/25/2023 at 11:37 PM, 250swb said:

The idea that the modern digital photographer is somehow pure and skilled if they do nothing to improve their photo in post processing ignores the fact that somebody else sitting at a desk at Leica did have that opinion for you, right or wrong. Somebody you never met, somebody writing firmware to appeal to the lowest common denominator. That isn't a standard, it is a surrender.

Some things never change – it was "somebody else sitting at a desk" at Kodak who had to decide what the colour balances of Kodachrome and Ektachrome would be, and we as photographers had to decide which of the two we preferred. Other somebodies were responsible for the colour balance of 1960s-era Agfacolor and Perutz (the reversal films that my father preferred), and that of the Ferraniacolour that I preferred. For a while in the 1960s I used Ansco reversal film - its colour balance was far from accurate, but to my eyes was very pleasing.

Same goes for the digital era. I trusted Leica to handle the task of creating JPEGs in my camera, and recall someone from Leica telling me that the JPEG's from the Digilux 1 were different to those created by the Panasonic equivalent. For example, the latter camera produced JPEGs with a saturation level that would be too strong for European tastes, I was told.

After buying my M-D, I did a shootoff between RawTherapee, and evaluation copies of Lightroom, Capture One, and PhotoNinja. To my eyes, Capture One produced the best 'out of the box' images, so that's the product I now use, and in the light of experience have decided which parameters are to be set to 'auto' and which as to be left 'as is'. But that's simply my personal preference – another photographer would probably have come to a different conclusion.

[250swb]

21 hours ago, roydonian said:

Some things never change – it was "somebody else sitting at a desk" at Kodak who had to decide what the colour balances of Kodachrome and Ektachrome would be, and we as photographers had to decide which of the two we preferred. Other somebodies were responsible for the colour balance of 1960s-era Agfacolor and Perutz (the reversal films that my father preferred), and that of the Ferraniacolour that I preferred. For a while in the 1960s I used Ansco reversal film - its colour balance was far from accurate, but to my eyes was very pleasing.

 

But in the olden days people would simply change the film they used if they liked the colour produced by one more than another. Nowadays they change entire camera systems if reviewers or peers suggest one make of camera produces 'better' colour than another. It doesn't go unobserved in camera forums and you'll often see comments on the subject of tweaking the colours in post processing instead of changing cameras, to which the answer is 'lack of time', but this doesn't factor in the hours of labour required to earn enough to then go out and spend thousands of pounds on a new camera system.

Choosing a RAW processor is a type of post processing, it is at least making a choice. But all too often 'post processing' is taken to be only about the worst excesses people have ever seen and judged unilaterally on that, or as if post processing was a dirty word. Lack of post processing is on the other hand sometimes taken to be a self awarded badge of honour, a label to show how pure and unsullied the photographer is, it's the old 'closed for criticism' trick, the photograph can't be criticised because it is pure in spirit and sent by the Gods at Sony, or Leica. But most post processing is done either based on traditional darkroom work (and it is often about working on a photograph), or having simple opinions about correcting colour or contrast etc. So all post processing is doing is following in the traditions of photography, the method may be new in photography, but it's not a new fangled practice.

Edited March 28, 2023 by 250swb

[roydonian]

While the magenta problem of the Leica M8 was a real and well-documented technical deficiency, I treat claims that one top-grade camera brand produces better colours than another with a very large pinch of salt. I've had several articles published in the LHSA 'Viewfinder' magazine – if a photo taken with a Zeiss Contax camera and Sonnar lens had been sneaked into these, would anyone have complained that the colours didn't seem right? But when I browse through a non-specialist photo magazine these days, many of the photos look un-natural to my elderly eyes, probably as a result of excessive use of tools such as clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders. 

I have no idea whether there really are photographers who regard minimal  post processing as "a self awarded badge of honour, a label to show how pure and unsullied the photographer is". But in a newspaper or magazine office during the film era it was more a case of telling the darkroom staff  "Push it two stops, and the production department will need the prints to by 4pm at the latest."

What I find amusing is that as Anbaric explained, today news publications have strict rules over what forms and degree of retouching are permitted, but in the film era, a small room on a floor above where we journalists worked was the lair of two grey-haired gentlemen whose sole purpose in life was to retouch photographic prints, sometimes to the point of making an unusable photo suitable for reproduction on the printed page. Their talents were rarely needed, but when they were the result often seemed near-miraculous, even if large areas of the print were now paint rather than emulsion.

[hansvons]

17 minutes ago, roydonian said:

But when I browse through a non-specialist photo magazine these days, many of the photos look un-natural to my elderly eyes, probably as a result of excessive use of tools such as clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders.

Agree. Often way beyond kitsch. Especially landscape photography went totally bonkers. YouTube is a brilliant source for that sort of wisdom.

[jaapv]

7 hours ago, hansvons said:

Agree. Often way beyond kitsch. Especially landscape photography went totally bonkers. YouTube is a brilliant source for that sort of wisdom.

It is just a fad. If people like. It that way. Why not?  

 

[roydonian]

Because a magazine that accepts/promotes the fad is of less interest to readers who do not. So those readers may stop buying the magazine, and having become used to not having the magazine, may never go back to buying it.

[Anbaric]

On 3/28/2023 at 7:02 PM, roydonian said:

What I find amusing is that as Anbaric explained, today news publications have strict rules over what forms and degree of retouching are permitted, but in the film era, a small room on a floor above where we journalists worked was the lair of two grey-haired gentlemen whose sole purpose in life was to retouch photographic prints, sometimes to the point of making an unusable photo suitable for reproduction on the printed page. Their talents were rarely needed, but when they were the result often seemed near-miraculous, even if large areas of the print were now paint rather than emulsion.

Certainly things have changed. A famous image like Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother', for example, would not in its most familiar form meet current standards due to significant manipulation and apparently misleading captions. But I think in an age when reality can be dismissed as Fake News and substituted with Alternative Facts, seamless manipulation is just a mouse click away, and entirely bogus images can be generated from virtual whole cloth by AI, tighter standards are needed more than ever for news reporting. And it continues to astonish me what is possible even within today's constraints on editing by photographers who have truly mastered light, composition and timing, often working in the most challenging conditions. The regional winners of this year's World Press Photo have just been announced, with the overall results to follow later this month, and it's clear that the high standard of previous years is being maintained, as in these galleries for 2022, 2021 and 2020. How many of these images would really be 'improved' by more extensive editing, even if it were allowed and did not invalidate the pictures for news purposes?

Edited April 1, 2023 by Anbaric

[Anbaric]

3 hours ago, Anbaric said:

How many of these images would really be 'improved' by more extensive editing, even if it were allowed and did not invalidate the pictures for news purposes?

By the way, there is one extraordinary exception that dramatically reinforces the point: 'The Book of Veles', a winner last year. Today is the ideal day to read about it!:

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo-contest/2022/Jonas-Bendiksen/1

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/book-veles-jonas-bendiksen-hoodwinked-photography-industry/

[jrp]

A raw file is not that different from a negative.  Make of it what you will.

Where you do hit boundary cases is the application of the likes of noise reduction software which can recreate false detail.

Probably doesn't matter of the picture looks better unless you are presenting evidence on Court, or on twitter (although in that case, the details will probably be invisible anyway).

[ianforber]

On 3/24/2023 at 2:08 PM, jaapv said:

You might delete a smaller percentage with processing. If I like the content I will go all-out with processing and regularly arrive at a satisfactory result However certainly not always 😉

Fair point. I should clarify that I press the shutter button assuming that post processing will be required, I just prefer to minimise how much is needed. At the moment I’ve got into the (bad?) habit of using presets that attempt to mimic historic film types. I know they aren’t accurately representing what the film would’ve looked like but I just choose one (usually an Agfa) that produces something I like. 

[250swb]

On 4/3/2023 at 12:37 PM, ianforber said:

Fair point. I should clarify that I press the shutter button assuming that post processing will be required, I just prefer to minimise how much is needed. At the moment I’ve got into the (bad?) habit of using presets that attempt to mimic historic film types. I know they aren’t accurately representing what the film would’ve looked like but I just choose one (usually an Agfa) that produces something I like. 

What's bad about making an image you like? You'd eat something you like rather than food you don't like wouldn't you? You have the right to an opinion whether you are following a trend or going your own way. Using presets is a perfect way to adjust an image and at the very least it's a starting point that you can modify further while keeping post processing simple. They are an aspect of digital photography which replaces the volumes written about pushing and pulling Tri-X or is 'selenium toning prints better than gold toning?' Photography has never been a straight line from which you cannot deviate. 

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[wizard]

Am 21.3.2023 um 17:14 schrieb SOLA:

The image is what it is and the quality of what you capture shows what you and your camera can do.

As a long time slide photographer, I know exactly where you come from. Nowadays you do not know whether any published or posted image is even remotely similar to reality, i.e. to what the photographer saw when he/she pressed the shutter button. I am not against post-processing, but I am no fan of images that have basically been made up by using a computer and tons of post-processing. Each to his own I guess. Post-processing is welcome though to adjust an image to match what my personal perception or recollection was when taking the photograph, but that's it for me.

 

Am 21.3.2023 um 20:30 schrieb earleygallery:

I used to shoot slides more than negs and I think we forget that we had to get things right in camera all the time with those!

Exactly.