opinions? on natural vs. post processing

[cdubya]

.... Anyways, don't fall into the hype of not editing your photos. People that use film use different tricks while developing their film that causes more contrast, etc. It's art, run with it. A picture that hasn't been tweaked by the taker is a picture created merely by a camera, not the photographer.

ok so some guy told me my unedited photos were crap, which most people thought they were great. i was not shooting in auto or anything, the particular shot was aperture priority with cust. wb and was shot with my custom settings.

What is your opinions on this matter, most photographers i know say that if you don't have to edit your photo to take a great photograph then thats real photography, which i agree with. don't get me wrong, i think the post process people are great and it can add extra artistic and takes lots of skill but i see it as another form of "art"

[Zansho]

It's a means to an end. Post production helps take that "end" further. The way I see it, in the era of photoshop, you'd be a bit silly not to take advantage of all the tools at your disposal to create.

Ethical arguments aside (photojournalism editing is a no-no), why WOULDN'T you want to improve your images? Back in the days of film we had push and pull processing, using dual done on paper, poloroid manipulation, greasing filters with odd oils to get surreal effects.. how is this any different than using a computer to make the same effects?

[Doug Pardee]

It's a matter of "to each their own". Different people like different things. Some people like pictures with "pop", some like the natural look, some like a surreal look, some like a subdued look, and so on.

When someone else tells you that what you like is "crap", feel free to ignore their opinion. Unless you're doing work for sale, the only person you need to satisfy is yourself.

[NOsquid]

Where does it end? Does adjusting the saturation, sharpness, contrast in camera mean you're faking it too?

[SlowBlink]

If you're shooting with custom settings what's the difference? You're still doing post, just in camera. You're still editing the photo. Don't worry about what someone tells you. If you like the output you're getting keep doing what you're doing.

Where does it end? Does adjusting the saturation, sharpness, contrast in camera mean you're faking it too?

It ends when you stop cleaning your lens. The dust is supposed to be there, it's natural. :)

[oaktree]

If Ansel Adams can "PP" his negatives to get great prints, it should be OK for us to PP our photo files before we press the print command.

[Perry Ge]

There is no such thing, and there has never been such thing as a 'natural photograph'. It's about whether you want to be in control or let other factors decide how your final image looks.

With DSLRs, if you shoot RAW, you HAVE to post-process.

I also do not know of, and have never heard of an actual photographer who believes this:

most photographers i know say that if you don't have to edit your photo to take a great photograph then thats real photography, which i agree with. don't get me wrong, i think the post process people are great and it can add extra artistic and takes lots of skill but i see it as another form of "art"

The 'straight from camera = natural' opinion is a load of crap, usually uttered by P&S users who don't realise that a bucketload of processing is taking place in their cameras instead of under their control.

I have never, ever seen or made a photograph, film or digital, that looked better or even acceptable straight out of camera than it did after processing. The photographic process does not end, and never has ended, with the press of the shutter.

[SlowBlink]

The best photographer is going to make the most of his tools. If that's digital it includes computer and software. To limit yourself because of a philosophy based on some romantic ideal is ridiculous IMO.

[sjones]

...i think the post process people are great and it can add extra artistic and takes lots of skill but i see it as another form of "art"

Learn about the history of photography, learn about traditional darkroom techniques even if you never touch a film camera in your life.

[Picture North Carolina]

It's both, my friends. The skills on either end - with the camera and with the mouse - can compliment each other to create art, and the operative word here is "art."

Your definition of art is no more right that somebody else's, and theirs is no more right than yours. Art is about appreciation. If you see an image you like, enjoy it! Appreciate it! It's not yours to try to diminish another's work because you don't agree with the methodology or medium or techniques they used to create it. If you like it, admire it. If you don't, get over it and move on.

/Dan

[artyboy]

for RAW files, post-processing is required, esp sharpening becos of the anti-aliasing filter infront of the sensor. even Canon's official 1D/1DS Mark III setup guide recommends using sharpening either via DPP or Photoshop. for JPEGs, "pre-processing" is already done inside the camera unless you're shooting in Faithful/Neutral mode.

[chauncey]

I can't begin to count the number of times, during my 18 month foray into photography, that I have been told to "get it right in the camera".

It used to concern me because I was new and didn't know how to do that, still don't.

Now I think of them as a group of elitists who would be more at home in a high school philosophy class then opining on the photography skills and techniques of others. It is akin to the debate regarding angels on the head of a pin and about as productive.

I found an essay over on LL that expresses this viewpoint better than I can. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/cameras-matter.shtml It's a little off topic, but it does address the same mindset.

With this post, you opened Pandora's Box.

[John_B]

What is your opinions on this matter, most photographers i know say that if you don't have to edit your photo to take a great photograph then thats real photography, which i agree with. don't get me wrong, i think the post process people are great and it can add extra artistic and takes lots of skill but i see it as another form of "art"cdubya,
Its like back in the old film days the difference between negative film and slide film. ;)

I personally strive to get it right in the camera, and treat camera settings like different types of film. Of course software is needed to print or resize for web display, but I have found most of my photos don't need to be edited for prints which makes this photographer happy with his photos :)

There are many ways, and many types of people to use them :)

[airfrogusmc]

Ansel Adams once said something like making the exposure is writing the score and printing it was performing the piece.

Give three very gifted photographers that process and print a negative and you will get three different interpretations of that negative (final print). Just like three different conductors while interpret a musical score differently.

Only the photographer that made the exposure knows what the finished print is suppose to look like. So only the photographer can truly interpret the final image correctly.

Photoshop is just a digital darkroom and in my opinion any photographer that doesn't master and use photoshop is cheating his vision.

Ansel Adams was a tireless technician. He would expose his negatives then change his development times on his negatives to get the range of zones(tones) his minds eye saw when he made the exposure. He would then take it father when making the final print. Yosemite never looked the way his final prints look. Its the way he say it when he made the exposure (pre-visualization).

The closer you get it in the camera the more possibilities you have in the darkroom or in photoshop. To not print your own negatives and to not do post production on your files is limiting your visual statements.

[neilwood32]

Ive only been taking photography seriously for about 6 months (was spray and pray before) and this comes up all the time.

All photo's are post processed - BAR NONE! Even if you use the cheapest disposable camera - it needs the developer to make decisions about what to do to get prints from it. Same for large format/medium format/DSLR/P&S etc.

Just because some people dont see the processing (ie in camera with JPEG) doesnt mean that it doesnt exist. Do they think that JPEG just appeared as a standard? No it took commitees to decide what processing would provide a JPEG.

So to anyone that says processing is wrong, well i guess they should put the cameras down and walk away.

Now, i would say that its best to get it right ie exposed correctly with the composition nearly 100% in camera but even with that, some post production can improve it further. It can also destroy it (think of bad oversaturated HDR).

Guess im saying - we all process images, some to a greater extent than others. What is right and wrong is up to the individual and can vary from time to time and image to image.

Do what you feel is right - not what others say!

[tzalman]

for JPEGs, "pre-processing" is already done inside the camera unless you're shooting in Faithful/Neutral mode.
Neutral and Faithful are no less processed than any other Picture Style. Neutral is just a name invented by some Canon guy because it sounds better than Bland or Less Contrasty. If you make icecream you can make vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Because vanilla is less exciting than the others you could call it Neutral, but it takes mostly the same ingredients and just as much processing to get it to come out of the machine.

[René Damkot]

I can't begin to count the number of times, during my 18 month foray into photography, that I have been told to "get it right in the camera".

It used to concern me because I was new and didn't know how to do that, still don't.

Now I think of them as a group of elitists who would be more at home in a high school philosophy class then opining on the photography skills and techniques of others.

IMO you should get it "right" in the camera. If only because it gives you a better starting point to work on in post processing.

If you need to use PP to "rescue" a shot, IQ is going to suffer...

I'd say: Get it as close as possible in camera, use PP for the Icing on the cake. ;)

[airfrogusmc]

All of these things, cameras, lenses, photoshop, enlargers, dektol, rodinal are all just tools. Learn to use them and find what works for your vision so you can make images that have a little of you in them. Don't limit yourself with pre conceived ideas of what is or isn't a legit photograph.

Get it as close to right in camera as possible and complete your vision in photoshop or the darkroom.

[cdubya]

i think light usage of photoshop it fine, but some people just ruin saturation and contrast, and just make a junk photo into something its not.

[airfrogusmc]

i think light usage of photoshop it fine, but some people just ruin saturation and contrast, and just make a junk photo into something its not.

It just depends on the images and the desired end result and finding what works for you.

Sometimes I use hardly any photoshop sometimes I alter quite a bit but if its crap to begin with usually no amount of darkroom or photoshop can fix it....
Crap in...crap out

[cdubya]

well my goal with my photographs are to get them out of the camera the way i want them, because 1 i don't have time to post process, 2 i have a slow computer, & 3 i don't like to photoshop my work.


btw. for those of you that do p shop your work, i'm not trying to insult your work or anything just saying thats a different form of photography/art.

[CyberDyneSystems]

From last weeks thread on thsi same topic;
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=5060790#post5060790



http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=450482
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=418152
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=434221
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=277768
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=441358
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=405264
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=405720

It's been said, but I'll repeat it in a minimal form again.

The ONLY thing that has changed in photography from 15 years ago, is that the magic that was being done by a very select few in darkrooms, is now accessible to the masses.

That is all that has changed.
This change has had dramatic impacts all around, enthusiasm and sales all sky rocketed, media production skyrocketd..
But all of these changes and more are simply a result of this one basic issue of accessibility.

I totally disagree that it is a different from of art.
It is the same form. Just a different step in that art.

[airfrogusmc]

well my goal with my photographs are to get them out of the camera the way i want them, because 1 i don't have time to post process, 2 i have a slow computer, & 3 i don't like to photoshop my work.


btw. for those of you that do p shop your work, i'm not trying to insult your work or anything just saying thats a different form of photography/art.

So you take formal portraits and your not going to do your own retouching? Or your shooting on a flat overcast day and theres no contrast, your not going to add some? There are a million things that are still photography that need to be done to almost all images and limiting yourself is limiting your work. My advice is get a faster computer and learn all you can. Then you can make an informed decision on whether you want to use your images straight outta camera. I'll be theres not one person thats learned how to port process effectively that says now I wish I hadn't of learned that and I only show images straight from camera.

Adams was one of the first to articulate the zone system in a simple way and he used that to make final images that he pre visualized and is considered to be one of the TRUE straight photographers. A great photograph is usually a combination of both good capture/negative and good printing. Learn both they are very valuable tools.

[Technophile]

i think a lot of times the camera cant capture the scene the way you see it. we can see much greater contrast with our own eyes and different colors and saturations, so if you want to produce a photo of something as you see it, pp is really a requirement.

take a simple sunset for example; the sun setting is going to be far brighter than the surrounding landscape, so creating one exposure and making a final image representative of what you saw with your own eyes without dodging/burning/tone mapping/etc would be difficult, if not impossible.

[NOsquid]

well my goal with my photographs are to get them out of the camera the way i want them, because 1 i don't have time to post process, 2 i have a slow computer, & 3 i don't like to photoshop my work.


btw. for those of you that do p shop your work, i'm not trying to insult your work or anything just saying thats a different form of photography/art.

What image editing programs do you own and what is your experience with them?

I'm asking because, in most instances, it seems to me that people who "don't like to Photoshop" just don't know how to Photoshop.

[chauncey]

Photoshop CS3 and I have a love/hate thing.

The learning curve is absurd, but it does some neat stuff and I love it.

[sjones]

well my goal with my photographs are to get them out of the camera the way i want them, because 1 i don't have time to post process, 2 i have a slow computer, & 3 i don't like to photoshop my work.


btw. for those of you that do p shop your work, i'm not trying to insult your work or anything just saying thats a different form of photography/art.

As folks have already mentioned, if you are so much as adjusting the color tone, saturation, sharpness, contrast, color space, and so forth in your camera, you are in fact committing an act of post processing, as digital manipulation is applied to the image after the exposure; please acknowledge that you realize this.

Getting it right in the camera largely centers on exposure and composition, and cranking up the saturation in your camera or in Photoshop are for all philosophical purposes, the same.

You are correct in trying to get a photograph as close to your desired results at the time of exposure, but subsequently correcting the limitations of your camera does not automatically send you into a different realm of photography or art.

Photoshop CS3 and I have a love/hate thing.

The learning curve is absurd, but it does some neat stuff and I love it.

Not to make a pun, but focus on learning the curves function, and, aside from sharpening, it will likely handle more than 90 percent of your needs.

[artyboy]

Neutral and Faithful are no less processed than any other Picture Style. Neutral is just a name invented by some Canon guy because it sounds better than Bland or Less Contrasty. If you make icecream you can make vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Because vanilla is less exciting than the others you could call it Neutral, but it takes mostly the same ingredients and just as much processing to get it to come out of the machine.

yup, im not surprised. for the purists at heart then RAW is the way to go. i shoot in RAW but to me PP is mandatory, especially sharpening, considering that Canon themself is telling you that you need to do so becos of the anti-aliaising filter infront of the sensor. in this day and age one will be hard put to get a truly "raw" image (even from a RAW file), considering all the algorithms already incorporated into the camera's system. as someone pointed out, PP is no different from darkroom manipulation during the film era.

[JX]

People debate this question too much. The correct answer is get the exposure right in the camera, so when you post process you don’t degrade the image quality by making too many edits. Post processing is a natural part of creative processes that goes into making a fine digital image.

When I shot film, I used a variety of techniques to manipulate my photographs. Anyone who claims film photographers did not use techniques to manipulate the outcome of their prints does not know much about photo processing. Even with slide film, there were techniques to manipulate the image.

If you don’t want to post process your digital image that is ok. Many film photographers let photo labs process their film, the difference is that now your camera is doing the post processing.

[neilwood32]

Adams was one of the first to articulate the zone system in a simple way and he used that to make final images that he pre visualized and is considered to be one of the TRUE straight photographers. A great photograph is usually a combination of both good capture/negative and good printing. Learn both they are very valuable tools.


Have to contradict you here - he wasnt a "true straight photographer". He used Dodging and burning to alter the nature of highlights/shadows to achieve his creative vision. Only difference is that we have a larger selection of tools to use than he did (i would bet he would use them if he lived now!)

[Tandem]

I shoot RAW and I believe in minimal processing; minimal in the time sense. I'll use a preset when importing the RAW image into Lightroom, do minor corrections on the first image and copy the settings to the rest of the images. I can do just about everything I need to do in a batch except for cropping and rotating which needs to be done individually.

[PhotoBanker]

If you're shooting with custom settings what's the difference? You're still doing post, just in camera. You're still editing the photo. Don't worry about what someone tells you. If you like the output you're getting keep doing what you're doing.

Very true.

I sometimes dont like showing people the photos on my camera since i like to do a lot of cropping post, so i feel like they wont really understand what my vision was while looking at the preview.

[SlowBlink]

It's a tired straw man argument. I've never met this mythical photographer who doesn't bother even trying to get the exposure right because he can fix it in post. He's like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Everyone I've ever met or spoken to tries to get as much as they can before, not after. It's making up an argument that wasn't there in the first place.

I only do minimal post
You do as much post as you can to fix what you didn't get right in camera. Why would you do less?

It's over processed Unless you are there and you know what the photog was trying to achieve, how do you back up this judgement?

That's not real photography:
If you had any idea what a large format photog did after he shot and developed his images you'd be embarrassed to see that next to your name.

You can't prove an aesthetic but there has to be an elegance in which the statements fit together.

[sjones]

It's a tired straw man argument. I've never met this mythical photographer who doesn't bother even trying to get the exposure right because he can fix it in post. He's like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Everyone I've ever met or spoken to tries to get as much as they can before, not after. It's making up an argument that wasn't there in the first place.

I only do minimal post
You do as much post as you can to fix what you didn't get right in camera. Why would you do less?

It's over processed Unless you are there and you know what the photog was trying to achieve, how do you back up this judgement?

That's not real photography:
If you had any idea what a large format photog did after he shot and developed his images you'd be embarrassed to see that next to your name.

You can't prove an aesthetic but there has to be an elegance in which the statements fit together.

Exactly!

[Stime187]

Based on this thread, I suppose I'm a bit of an elitist. But here's my deal...

I get everything I possibly can right in one exposure.

Then, I spend at most 5-10 minutes in Photoshop doing basic processing. This is for every single photograph that I have any intention of doing anything with. I set a time limit for two reasons... a) I don't like Photoshop and messing with the computer and b) if it's taking too much processing for me to "get it right", it's not how I want to do my photography. I simply aim to capture the natural scene as I saw it, I don't want to improve or change it.

But yeah, that's my take. Post-processing is essential, especially when shooting RAW, but I don't choose for it to consume me. A lot can be done in-camera and the issue with Photoshop, is people seem to think of it as a crutch. You can't fix a bad photo in Photoshop. No matter what you do, it will never be as good as it could have been if you'd gotten it right in-camera.

- Scott

[AndreaBFS]

I am much more comfortable in PS than I am with a camera, but I have never heard anyone say they think they can take any crappy photo and make it great in Photoshop. I do a lot of PP on my images because that's where my comfort level is, but I can't imagine there is anyone out there who just says, "Gotcha! I know I should up the shutter speed here, but I don't feel like it today! I'll show YOU in Photoshop!"

I'm still trying to work on composition, but even a photo that's poorly composed looks better with a little PP applied. It's the difference between people flipping through your photos and thinking, "there's nothing wrong with these..." and "wow! look at that one..." "oh... that is sooo nice!" "where was THIS taken?? I love it."

[SlowBlink]

I don't think that's elitist Scott, sounds like the average work flow from what I've seen people post. My average time for an image in CS3 is probably under 5 minutes. Colour/Curves/Crop/Sharpen. I can spend an hour on an image if I'm playing around with a style but that's usually a creative exercise.

Using Photoshop well is a skill, not a bandage.

[Kamik636]

I spend quite a bit of time in photoshop working on my images. Not because they're crap, just because i like to exercise my creativity and try and get all i can out of my images. I usually don't even show any pics to anyone anymore without at least a couple min. of PP on each image. Then later on I'll go back and really see what i can come up with. Then again I'm always trying new things, and doing things different ways. It seems like each time i come back from taking pics i process them differently then i did last time. The difference with me i guess is that i actually enjoy using photoshop, it's all a part of the creative process for me.

[blackcap]

Based on this thread, I suppose I'm a bit of an elitist. But here's my deal...

I get everything I possibly can right in one exposure.

Then, I spend at most 5-10 minutes in Photoshop doing basic processing. This is for every single photograph that I have any intention of doing anything with.

5-10 mins per photo is actually a reasonable amount of time, so I don't think that makes you elitist at all. If you did 0 minutes, that would make you elitist.

I see a lot of photos where people say it's "straight out of the camera", or "no Photoshopping" and I'm thinking "yeah I can tell". It's one thing to have an amazing photo and make those claims (very rare IMO), but to boast about a drab photo....? Bizarre.

[cdifoto]

I apply some post work even to my Fuggy Finepix images. A basic tone curve at the very least, since it's rather low contrast by default and not adjustable in-camera. Then I resize and sharpen. That's bare minimum. All my cameras are great cameras, but none of them can read my mind.