Personally, I don't mind how far a photographer takes their editing. It is, after all, their image. A lot of 'fine art' images are processed to the max to give the desired result. My only gripe would be if an imaged is processed but the photographer says 'no, that's how I took it'. Honesty works best for me. Thanks for the video.
I agree with you 100%. There is only one person that has to be happy with my photographs. I have recently taken to turning B&W film photographs into color images that don't look anything like reality, but I like them.
There is a divide there between photographers who "take a photo" of a scene and try to make the scene look like it did on the day. These are what I call documentary shooters. Then there are those who "make an image" and try to create a piece of art that is usually quite different from reality at the end of the editing process. It's usually a fantastical version of the scene. Better than the real thing.
My goal when editing is to make it look like what I remember it looked like when I was there 😊 The eyes are much better than any camera in quick shifts of aperture and exposure. So the photos are often in need of some editing to make them look like we remember. What I don't like is extreme use of HDR, so the photos lose most of the dynamics and look just artificial. Moderat use of HDR can be a great help though in my opinion 😊 But it is hard to point out the limits. Everyone has their personal choices.
With a background in photojournalism, I definitely lean hard into “real”. My line is basically adding fake s*** via generative AI. Masking assist? Love it. But “lying” in my images with elements that didn’t exist when I opened the shutter, that isn’t going to happen in my work. To be fair, this is also a very personal and contextual topic. Are we documenting, or creating purely for artistic expression? Or both? Then there’s the commercial side - products, marketing, etc. Different lines in different genres and for different use cases.
When I have conversations about photo editing, I find that people often think it is a phenomenon that came about with digital photography and is therefore disingenuous - a view that comes from the belief that digital photography and photo editing are cheating somehow, when really photographers in the "good old days" used many of the same techniques of adapting e.g., exposure, saturation, colours, etc. And while art is subjective and everyone is entitled to their own tastes, I honestly had to laugh about the commenter's remark because you did such basic corrections - many people wouldn't pick up on them at all without the side-by-side, and I would barely call them photo editing. Also, what I feel the commenter forgets is that cameras see differently than the human eye. Ever photographed a brilliant sunset with all sorts of reds and pinks and oranges that just blow your mind? It never looks as brilliant in a straight-up photo. And I think it is fair to change that and make the photo reflect what your eyes saw, or take it further to reflect how it made you feel. Or take it even further than that and turn the photo into a whole new piece of art. I loved your point about intent because obviously post production/editing, filters, etc. have a whole new connotation nowadays with social media such as Instagram, where they are indeed regularly used to highly stylise and distort reality, usually with the intent to trick the viewer and to sell them things they don't need. So personally, I wouldn't worry about the person editing their landscape photo to make a few clouds and flowers more visible. Anyway, thank you for another wonderful, thoughtful, and insightful video. Keep it up. ❤
Editing or rather enhancing has been going on since the time of the glass plate cameras. A photographer can edit as much as he likes and it has nothing to do with reality. Photography is never real in anycase. But, there comes a point that the final image has no resemblance to the image the photographer had visualised, if any visualisation had taken place in the first place that is. We have all seen them, digital files over processed to the point of absurdity just to salvage a poor image and make something out of it and call it ' dramatic ', I think. I find them , all have the same look BTW , boring, garish and cliche. The annoying point is when it is pointed out, they say well Ansel Adams did it. Just goes to show how little they know about Adams, his work and his methodology. In the end, let me tell you of my opinion about a lot of photography calling themselves ' fine art '. Most of the ' artistic ' work is usually carried out in photoshop or similar image editting software. I don't consider them art, never mind fine art. Art's business is to elevate the mundane to sublime. Ask yourself if there were anything interesting in all those fine art photogarphs, let alone sublime. They are just computer assisted imagery.
While I agree with most of what you write I am surprised by your drift about what some call "fine art". Admittedly, this expression may well be a posture or an exaggeration. But behind it you find another example of what Tom stresses, i.e., the fact that a photograph does never actually represent reality itself, only what the camera sees plus what the photographer envisioned. For instance, many of those so-called "fine art" images are produced with very long exposures. Most classical are images of a static subject (pier, rock) floating on fog-like waters blurred by 15 minutes of movement. This illustrates an interesting aspect of photography also stressed by Tom: the camera can do many things that the human eye cannot. Here it is *integration* of light. If, knowing that, a photographer intends to translate his or her vision into those terms, it is a perfectly valid approach. How you name the end result is IMHO irrelevant. By the way, a properly exposed photograph like this (through a ND filter) does not necessarily need much post-processing. And for that matter, I could end with this question: is there some immanent limit in the balance between the time devoted to the making of a photograph in the field and the amount of time devoted to its post-processing? I don"t think so. Take as much time you deem appropriate to get the best final image. But there I may be biased by my long experience in astrophotography, where I have taken images of galaxies and nebulae with 10+ hours of total integration time, followed by at least as much processing time, the purpose being to produce a final image as close as possible to... reality 🙂
@@danielborcard2720 I don't mind the long exposure photography. It is not something that I would do, but it is using a camera differently. Whether they are art or not, I guess it should be up to the viewer. What I absolutely object to is a photographer who takes a photograph of a scene and then set out to systematically alter or altogether eliminate the elements in Photoshop so that he or she could give us a ' minimalist fine art ' photograph. They might as well take up painting. Incidentally I too used to do a lot of long exposure deep sky imaging from my backyard up to 2015. I mainly used narrow band filters on Mono CCDs for the Nebulae and a combination of Ha, OIII and RGB for the galaxies. Light pollution put a stop to it. Does Pixinsight ring a bell?
@@lensman5762 I agree with you if the photographer is not transparent about the whole procedure. If he or she is, we are speaking of a form of expression based on a photograph but considers it only as a starting point. Who am I to deny people to do as they wish? But then they must be thoroughly honest about their technique. And yes, it can rather be considered as computer-assisted graphic arts (oops 🙂) or something like that. And yes I do have and use PixInsight! Although my most recent work has been planetary, where I use AutoStakkert and AstroSurface.
Personally, I don't mind how far a photographer takes their editing. It is, after all, their image. A lot of 'fine art' images are processed to the max to give the desired result. My only gripe would be if an imaged is processed but the photographer says 'no, that's how I took it'. Honesty works best for me. Thanks for the video.
I agree with you 100%. There is only one person that has to be happy with my photographs. I have recently taken to turning B&W film photographs into color images that don't look anything like reality, but I like them.
Thanks
Thank you very much @@grahambeal6754
True, and very well explained!
Excellent thoughts.
There is a divide there between photographers who "take a photo" of a scene and try to make the scene look like it did on the day. These are what I call documentary shooters.
Then there are those who "make an image" and try to create a piece of art that is usually quite different from reality at the end of the editing process. It's usually a fantastical version of the scene. Better than the real thing.
My goal when editing is to make it look like what I remember it looked like when I was there 😊 The eyes are much better than any camera in quick shifts of aperture and exposure. So the photos are often in need of some editing to make them look like we remember. What I don't like is extreme use of HDR, so the photos lose most of the dynamics and look just artificial. Moderat use of HDR can be a great help though in my opinion 😊 But it is hard to point out the limits. Everyone has their personal choices.
Agree! Thank you for putting it so clearly.
Totally agree with your comments.
With a background in photojournalism, I definitely lean hard into “real”. My line is basically adding fake s*** via generative AI. Masking assist? Love it. But “lying” in my images with elements that didn’t exist when I opened the shutter, that isn’t going to happen in my work.
To be fair, this is also a very personal and contextual topic. Are we documenting, or creating purely for artistic expression? Or both? Then there’s the commercial side - products, marketing, etc. Different lines in different genres and for different use cases.
Luminar is the one that I hate most of all.
While I agree with your commenter that over-editing a photo is no good, I don't think the photograph in question has suffered it at all.
I kinda think he ment other photo you made as your final, when you changed angle and made sky more red i believe
Yeah i believe so too. Great video anyways.
When I have conversations about photo editing, I find that people often think it is a phenomenon that came about with digital photography and is therefore disingenuous - a view that comes from the belief that digital photography and photo editing are cheating somehow, when really photographers in the "good old days" used many of the same techniques of adapting e.g., exposure, saturation, colours, etc.
And while art is subjective and everyone is entitled to their own tastes, I honestly had to laugh about the commenter's remark because you did such basic corrections - many people wouldn't pick up on them at all without the side-by-side, and I would barely call them photo editing.
Also, what I feel the commenter forgets is that cameras see differently than the human eye. Ever photographed a brilliant sunset with all sorts of reds and pinks and oranges that just blow your mind? It never looks as brilliant in a straight-up photo. And I think it is fair to change that and make the photo reflect what your eyes saw, or take it further to reflect how it made you feel. Or take it even further than that and turn the photo into a whole new piece of art.
I loved your point about intent because obviously post production/editing, filters, etc. have a whole new connotation nowadays with social media such as Instagram, where they are indeed regularly used to highly stylise and distort reality, usually with the intent to trick the viewer and to sell them things they don't need.
So personally, I wouldn't worry about the person editing their landscape photo to make a few clouds and flowers more visible.
Anyway, thank you for another wonderful, thoughtful, and insightful video. Keep it up. ❤
Editing or rather enhancing has been going on since the time of the glass plate cameras. A photographer can edit as much as he likes and it has nothing to do with reality. Photography is never real in anycase. But, there comes a point that the final image has no resemblance to the image the photographer had visualised, if any visualisation had taken place in the first place that is. We have all seen them, digital files over processed to the point of absurdity just to salvage a poor image and make something out of it and call it ' dramatic ', I think. I find them , all have the same look BTW , boring, garish and cliche. The annoying point is when it is pointed out, they say well Ansel Adams did it. Just goes to show how little they know about Adams, his work and his methodology. In the end, let me tell you of my opinion about a lot of photography calling themselves ' fine art '. Most of the ' artistic ' work is usually carried out in photoshop or similar image editting software. I don't consider them art, never mind fine art. Art's business is to elevate the mundane to sublime. Ask yourself if there were anything interesting in all those fine art photogarphs, let alone sublime. They are just computer assisted imagery.
While I agree with most of what you write I am surprised by your drift about what some call "fine art". Admittedly, this expression may well be a posture or an exaggeration. But behind it you find another example of what Tom stresses, i.e., the fact that a photograph does never actually represent reality itself, only what the camera sees plus what the photographer envisioned. For instance, many of those so-called "fine art" images are produced with very long exposures. Most classical are images of a static subject (pier, rock) floating on fog-like waters blurred by 15 minutes of movement. This illustrates an interesting aspect of photography also stressed by Tom: the camera can do many things that the human eye cannot. Here it is *integration* of light. If, knowing that, a photographer intends to translate his or her vision into those terms, it is a perfectly valid approach. How you name the end result is IMHO irrelevant. By the way, a properly exposed photograph like this (through a ND filter) does not necessarily need much post-processing. And for that matter, I could end with this question: is there some immanent limit in the balance between the time devoted to the making of a photograph in the field and the amount of time devoted to its post-processing? I don"t think so. Take as much time you deem appropriate to get the best final image. But there I may be biased by my long experience in astrophotography, where I have taken images of galaxies and nebulae with 10+ hours of total integration time, followed by at least as much processing time, the purpose being to produce a final image as close as possible to... reality 🙂
@@danielborcard2720 I don't mind the long exposure photography. It is not something that I would do, but it is using a camera differently. Whether they are art or not, I guess it should be up to the viewer. What I absolutely object to is a photographer who takes a photograph of a scene and then set out to systematically alter or altogether eliminate the elements in Photoshop so that he or she could give us a ' minimalist fine art ' photograph. They might as well take up painting. Incidentally I too used to do a lot of long exposure deep sky imaging from my backyard up to 2015. I mainly used narrow band filters on Mono CCDs for the Nebulae and a combination of Ha, OIII and RGB for the galaxies. Light pollution put a stop to it. Does Pixinsight ring a bell?
@@lensman5762 I agree with you if the photographer is not transparent about the whole procedure. If he or she is, we are speaking of a form of expression based on a photograph but considers it only as a starting point. Who am I to deny people to do as they wish? But then they must be thoroughly honest about their technique. And yes, it can rather be considered as computer-assisted graphic arts (oops 🙂) or something like that. And yes I do have and use PixInsight! Although my most recent work has been planetary, where I use AutoStakkert and AstroSurface.