Am I missing something?

No camera ever captures what your eyes see exactly. Post proessing can be an attempt to make the photograph look MORE like your true memory. Alternatively, it is done to remove distractions and to enhance aspects of the image that you want to concentrate on - for studying detail or to create emotion.

I have trouble accepting some of the more extreme forms of photo editing, but I can never draw a definite line between what it acceptable and what is not.

It's all "cheating" in one way or another. It's all illusion - just a load of dots. It is never really true memory, or true anything.

Hardgravity wrote:
Sorry if it seems unhelpful, what I'm trying to show is a memory.

If the picture is a memory for you, then its served its purpose. I have a few piccies that are slightly blurred and not brilliantly exposed. I haven't deleted them as they are one offs that won't necessarily be repeatable, but mean something to me.

WRT to your piccy - I quite like it as it is:it has atmosphere and shows struggle and effort. I suspect you could only have got the waterfall and the shadow area exposed 'correctly' using sevral exposures and HDR! Which of course would have been impossible for the guy on the rope to stay put!

(Just my twopence worth)
Andy

That's a fair comment John.
I never used a dark room so I had to get the shot as accurate as possible, which seems to be a dying aim.
If Hefty's right , I seem to fit in the hunter section, looking for the perfect kill (shot).

Still, I feel the need for EXTREME PS work seems to be taking over from the art of waiting for the light/pose/subject to be at the optimum point before taking the shot.

Digital does make this easier, multiple bracket shots, high capacity memory cards and fast cameras adding to the ease.

The camera can rarely capture what the eye sees without some sort of manipulation, the sensors / film can only distinguish about 5 stops of light (correct me if Im talking rubbish)so therefore some way of stopping a shot becoming too contrasty may need to be done in certain shots. This may mean using ND Grads to darken the sky, or it may be done in Lightroom/photoshop. The end result is very similar.

Likewise a shot may just appear flat and pretty boring, but thats not what you saw when you took the shot, so a small adjustment of levels and adjusting the shadow detail will help to give a better photograph.

I am just a beginer at this but I have included an example, not that I am any good at this and the shot is not so good, but the first pic is straight out of the box, the second i have tweaked about with the exposure, blacks, clarity etc and to my mind the image is a bit more how I want it. Although its a throw away picture. Not saying my work is any good, just that small use of PS or LR can enhance an image. In my opinion of course

[IMG]http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f396/Hannabella/testshot.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f396/Hannabella/testshot2.jpg[/IMG]

I don't know where you guys get the time to do all this image manipulation. I hardly get the time to take the photo in the first place. And anyway, my teenage daughter is welded to the house PC and I'd be lucky to sneak 5mins without hearing a plaintive 'Daaad...'

So I like to think about the shot and try and get it right first time because I know I won't have the time afterwards to iron out the imperfections or to enhance the good bits.

Good example from SteveT on how to tweak a photo to make it more 'pleasing to the eye'. (is that the right phrase?)

Oh I agree Coriander (my favourite herb by the way)
You should always try an get it right in camera.

But to add to what I already said, if for example you take a great picture, you really love that photograph and want to hang it on your wall and show it to others or maybe you could even sell it. Trouble is you didn't notice when you took the photograph that there was an old cigarette packet in the frame? Would you want to clone it out and have a great picture, or leave it on your pc because the image was ruined.

Or, you take the picture and its exactly as you want it, but the sun off to 90 degrees has caused a slight blue hue over the distant trees. That certainly wasn't visible to your naked eye but has been caused by the lens. Would you perhaps want to mask off the area and reduce the blue effect by altering the blue hue a little, I know I would.

I don't however like false looking pictures and over use of Photoshop, in a photograph, but the there is digital art which can be amazing but is a different category altogether.

This sort of 'photoshopping' is, to me, no different from using a particular type of film. I mostly used Velvia for its rich, saturated colours (especially greens), others might have chosen Kodachrome for its more muted, 'natural' tones. Boosting contrast, saturation etc, is not what most people would consider 'photoshopping', unless I'm wrong. I do all this at the raw processing stage anyway.

That wasn't how I took Chris's comment. I read it as meaning it's only a 'bad photo' in the sense that technically it's got its faults, and the casual observer could say "that's a bad photo", in a limted and unhelpful sense. To you, it's got meaning and captures what you saw at the time, so you can think of it as a good photo, or at least not a bad one.

As far as the original question is concerned, I occassionally clone out a small distraction, will always change the contrast, saturation etc (if I were shooting jpegs then I would alter these in camera before taking the shots, with perhaps a few tweaks in photoshop), sometimes create panoramic shots from several images and often use photoshop for creating posters and leaflets etc, so plenty of 'manipulation' there.

As I've said before, shoddily done photoshopping can easily ruin a picture for me. If a sky or background has been changed, it's often nearly done right, but there's a tell-tale fault which will spoil it (for me anyway). If you're going to do something like that, you need to spend a long time getting it right. My general feeling is "B*gger that for a lark!"

Dan

Thanks for the elaboration, Dan - you got my meaning exactly.

don't do much myself but then I don't have PS CS or Elements. I got a lot out of SilkyPix when I used a 30 day license for improving some wedding photos.

For the most part I'd be inclined to say get it right first time if you can and you then get the most out of the camera.

Other than that I find Paint.net is enough for me if I want to do any red eye removal, cropping, monochrome conversion, its more than enough for me.

That said the results to some things I did on Silkypix were very nice, like some of the alternate colour schemes. Film K setting on a portrait of my daughters and her friends instantly made the pic seem like it was taken in the 70's, a nice effect.

I find there also there are way too many over photoshopped images out there, especially of landscapes, that just don't look real. Fine if they are pure art but don't pass it off as being what you actually saw.

One question that does arise for me on this is on monochrome which for me is where you can go purely artistic. I would like to (one day given the time) do more with that especially a la Ansell Adams style. Can anyone recommend software for that?

I do mess about with most of my shots in the RAW converter and Photoshop.
In the film days I would bring my film to the lab and get the prints, no way to interfere with them. As I was a student then I didn't have the means to give the prints to a printing expert but rather used the photo chains (and their offers for big prints, sometimes). The results were a mixed bag.

When I started using the *istD and printing at home I was blown away by how much better quality I was able to achieve. (Don't get me wrong, I know that this level of quality could have been achieved with film; it just wasn't achievable for me at the time). I got my first truly sharp enlargements. Wow!

Now I'm taking pics in RAW exclusively (RAW+JPG if I need something to show quickly) and this way I have to touch every single image. And I think that sometimes it requires a bit more than a slight touch up to recreate what you saw at the time.

This is an example from our recent holidays. This is a conversion with the standard set (which, in case of a digital camera means that already a lot of processing has gone into that, let's not forget that!):
[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_RDP2816aswas.jpg[/IMG]

Yes, I know it was a bit hazy at the time but this does look more like fog. Not at all how I remember it.

Processing in SilkyPix by changing white balance, gamma, contrast, curves etc. I ended up with something that better resembled my impression at the time:
[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/_RDP2816dpr.jpg[/IMG]

Of course resizing and sharpening also was applied.
Overall I think I haven't done too much that could not have been done by a dedicated expert in the darkroom with film (not sure about WB but suspect that a lot can be done with filters).
Yes, it's easier now on the computer (at least for me it is; I'm sure people used to do all kinds of wizardry in the darkroom had lots of trouble achieving the same results on the computer) but basically all that was possible then and has been used by most of the acclaimed photographers (all of them perhaps).

Am I cheating? I don't feel that way but I can understand that point of view. As was said, each to their own.

Prieni

P.S.: Looking through the PPG entries and reading photographers comments like "shot straight from camera, no PP" or similar, most of the time (but not always!) I do think "yes, I can see that. It would have been better with some PP applied". (And, as I said, in these cases the camera already did a lot of processing on the image anyways.)

Of course, I do more than just crop. When I first got involved in digital I spent way too much time on the computer but now it's very little time. I got through and throw out problem photos. The others might get fifteen seconds of change.

I don't see the big issue in whether the camera software sets the white balance or the computer software sets the white balance.

If someone says "no PP" and the shot is not in a bayer pattern, then he or she is lying.

1) It doesn't always have to take hours. Some useful manipulation can be done in a few seconds per shot. That's all it takes to slide some sliders!

2) There is not always the time to "get it right" at the scene when the subject or light is rapidly disappearing, or sometimes I may not want to spend the time because I'm getting cold and wet!

3) Certain things can be done with post processing that cannot be done with the camera, no matter how much time is spent with it.

Actually if I have to crop I didnt compose it right in the first place. Cropping is something I very seldom do.

I agree you should get the best result possible from the camera, but if you dont take it any further you are simply accepting the limitations of the manufacturers settings for saturation, contrast, DR, noise, CA, lens distortion, etc.. Why should I feel constrained by these artificial limitations?

For instance, I may deliberately underexpose a very high DR shot to preserve the highlights, knowing I can bring the shadows up later. The end result is something far more like what I saw since my eyes and brain can see a much greater tonal range.

Similarly the cameras tone curve may not work well with a very low key shot, hence I can add some contrast. Again, I am just making it look more like what I saw. OK, I could adjust the contrast in camera to "high" but I would rather shoot in RAW and do that in the editor. I dont see the difference.

And I always correct for CA, barrel distortion and perspective correction as these are purely optical constraints of the system, not of the scene.

i just shoot and take them off the camera. i've converted a few to B&W, but they were taken with a view to that. also straightened some as i am wonky - or lean the camera on something wonky as i have no tripod.