Love it or loathe it?

I really sit on the fence with this one. I use it a fair amount in my digital stuff as i feel it is part of the process. However for my film scans i don't want to use it at all.. strange mentality.. so what do you think?

I used to spend a lot of time in the darkroom, altering exposure time/changing filters to adjust contrast etc. Now i use photoshop. Same theory. Different tools.

I use it when I have to, but try & get it as close as I want it in camera to save being sat infront of the computer manipulating & correcting.
I'm a photographer-not an IT bod.

yea i agree with you golden. most of my photoshop use is for things unachievable in camera.

What do you use it for? I know some people use it for some quite major changes to make the finished product look nothing like the original. Each to thier own, just not my personal style, which is what it's all about.
Photography is an art (usually) so there's no right or wrong answer

and

for two recent examples. the first one's pretty obvious i added in the two other lenses. For the second one i merged in more balloons from other shots.

Photoshop does have a lot to answer for. As a graphic designer who's spent a while working in publishing, standards have definately slipped

Now you'll get some muppet with a digital camera, who hasn't a clue about lighting or composition, giving me some god-awful shots with the phrase "well… you can sort it out in photoshop can't you?"

My standard reply is to ask them which would be the better option:

1.Pay me for half a day to essentially polish turds (which in all honesty are never going to look half decent) or
2. Spend the same money on getting a decent photographer to take some proper shots

I give them the contact details of some decent snappers i know. Unfortunately I'm seldom listened too

Its great I can produce work with it I could never do in a conventional darkroom. There's a fairly steep learning curve with Photoshop and there apears to be 2-3 ways of achieving the same end but I guess that's because its so versatile. These days I use Lightroom to manage my images so I do a lot of basic exposure, levels, curves etc on that and use Photoshop for more complicated editing.

For me its about getting the image how i want. Alot of the time the stuff i get out of the camera is just the groundwork, the finishng touches need to be done in photshop/aperture. eg.

to

the finishng touches need to be done in photshop/aperture

Or you could have got the lighting right in the first place.

hmmm it is? Theres detail in the whole of the image allowing me to then choose where i want the main emphasis to be etc in photoshop. No details lost to highlights or shadows… a little underexposed maybe…

Or you could have got the lighting right in the first place.

😳

Photoshop is a wonderful tool, in the right hands, but only in the same way that a chisel in Rodin's hands is. Too much obviously 'Shopped stuff out there, especially that awful HDR effect so many mediocre photographers seem to love.

Its nice that Tommy. If you've got a picture in your mind of what you want the end result to look like then I don't see a problem with how you achieve it. Its just a tool

hmmm it is? Theres detail in the whole of the image allowing me to then choose where i want the main emphasis to be etc in photoshop. No details lost to highlights or shadows… a little underexposed maybe…

Read this. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

Read this. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

I'm not really bothered about technical stuff like that though…it doesnt always result in a good image, it results in a well exposed image which isnt always right for every situation. Also it wouldnt have been possible to get a 'perfect exposure' (as per article) for the above anyway, the histogram on the above image lies far to the left, if it was all far to the right* it just wouldnt work surely? Aso, in real life it wasnt 'perfectly exposed' as in the eye saw what the camera saw e.g i didnt see detail in the inside of the shoe or out the door etc?

On seeing that picture, I inadvertently farted. 😳

On seeing that picture, I inadvertently farted.

You should probably see someone about that!

well i pissed myself.
will book an appointment asap with a health professional to rectify that.

its amazing/frightening what effect the show hot/cold areas has on some people.

I'm not really bothered about technical stuff like that though…it doesnt always result in a good image, it results in a well exposed image which isnt always right for every situation.

LOL.

Learn the technical stuff, and choose to ignore it later if you wish. You're trying to build a castle from sand.

I highly recommend these excellent tutorials:
You Suck At Photoshop

Learn the technical stuff, and choose to ignore it later if you wish. You're trying to build a castle from sand.

Fine, but technical expertise don't really trump creativity…something to fall back on when you run out of ideas perhaps, or maybe even to help you reach a creative idea….yet I hardly think richard billingham was checking his histograms when he was making Rays a Laugh etc etc

Billingham iirc had a training in fine art so he'd have the creative thing, oh and he shot on film.

If you'd shot that on film you'd have been knackered (presuming you are not a wizard in the darkroom too)

But i wasnt shooting on film….so i merely appreciated the technical capabilities of post production software, wonderful stuff eh? Not much done in aperture: +1 exposure, 0.08+ contrast, defintion upped to 0.89 and saturation/vibrance adjustment. Is that not possible to do with film in a darkroom?

And precisely, billingham probably isnt technically perfect, yet the images are still 'good' (obviously very subjective, yet it was recieved as a great project)? So technical skill….not always that important. Obviously in advertising and the commerical world technical skill IS important….but creativity probably is the differentiating factor between photographers. Not photoshop or camera skill…

It's possible to take a picture like that, with the exposure and lighting right, on film, with no need for any post production.

I think richpip's point is that a mastery of the basic principles of photography can help when making the creative decisions before you even pick up the camera. All the 'greats' have been people who could 'see' a good image, before they took it.

As I said earlier; PS is a wonderful tool, but it's only as effective as the artist wielding it.

IMO; too much PS is used to try to make silk purses from sows' ears…

Pretty crazy stuff coming in the new CS5 – check out the 'content-aware fill' videos on youtube. 😯

It's possible to take a picture like that, with the exposure and lighting right, on film, with no need for any post production.

Agreed, it probably is possible. BUT, what makes the photo set up with lights better than that without and using PS? Just another bit of equipment surely…

too much PS is used to try to make silk purses from sows' ears…

if it works, it works, no one looking at a photo cares how it came about unless they're obsessive.

Knowing how to use equipment is one thing; knowing how to use light is fundamental to photography.

Personally, I think the lighting in that picture is quite poor, if you want my honest pinion. Photoshop has merely transformed a poor picture into a barely acceptable one.

Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, I'm just expressing my honest opinions. Please don't take this the wrong way.

I totally agree with binners. When I had a job scanning and photoshopping film images it was easy to get a good end result, even if the original print/tranny was a bit iffy, because the client could see exactly what his original looked like,
and was always delighted with the tweaked finished result, but with digital, far too often the pic has burned out highlights,
loads of artefacting from excessive jpegging, due to trying to cram too many images onto a memory card,
though this is less of an issue now there's multi-megapixel chips and cheap high capacity cards. Used to be a real
issue with early digital cameras, I used to have to deal with pics for Canon's in-house magazine, and I'd get a bunch of 85 or 100k files that they wanted printed at A5 or A6. 😯
People criticise the iPhone camera, but its 2Mp (3G) chip is a model of sophistication by comparison to what I used to get:
1.2Mp images on an 8Mb card, compressed down to about 12k. Eeeep!
Regarding scanned film, it should always be checked over in Photoshop, just to get rid of the inevitable dust and scratches that get picked up, a 35mm slide at 300dpi enlarged to A4 is around 800-1000%, so blemishes are gonna
really show up. PS is a wonderful tool if used with care and discretion; the end result should always look as if it's just skilled use of available light and/or filters, or clever lighting. IMVHO, of course.

I too appreciate photoshop/lightroom/aperture/noiseninja/photomatix etc etc.

They all have their place.

Agreed, it probably is possible. BUT, what makes the photo set up with lights better than that without and using PS? Just another bit of equipment surely…

You won't have those black bits showing "blue" which means that all (or most) of the picture will have detail.

You won't have those black bits showing "blue" which means that all (or most) of the picture will have detail.

But if thats how i wanted the final picture to look (e.g contrasty, vignetted and dark doors)….then it would be the same?

If they werent 'blue' then it would just look like a picture taken at daytime/ it would have to be daytime as they're always gonig to remain blue as they were pitch black?

Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, I'm just expressing my honest opinions. Please don't take this the wrong way.

Not at all, I like to hear peoples opinions on my work. To be fair you're judng it purely as it is, there, no other work or explanation and thats fine.

That image was from a project about absence, so a hugely well lit and perfectly exposed scene wouldnt have worked as well for it…

What we can all probably agree on is that if anyone heads towards the 'filters' drop-down they should probably be executed 😀

What we can all probably agree on is that if anyone heads towards the 'filters' drop-down they should probably be executed

ya think ?

I use it when I have to, but try & get it as close as I want it in camera to save being sat infront of the computer manipulating & correcting.
I'm a photographer-not an IT bod.

I've been saying that for years! Nice to hear someone else say it.

Set your camera up to produce the images you like re contrast, colour saturation etc. just as you used to buy certain types of film over others years back.

If you need to use PS extensively, you need photography lessons. and the phrase used above "you can't polish a turd" is spot on.

I'm a photographer-not an IT bod.

isn't that the equivalent of a film photog saying he doesn't want to spend time in the darkroom because he is a photographer not a chemist?

I don't think it is possible to always get it exactly right in-camera, unless you do a custom White Balance, load in a specific response curve, set the contrast, saturation, sharpness etc for each shot. Which kind of ruins the moment.

And even then you're left with a photo that may benefit from an Unsharp Mask to remove the softness of the anti-alias filter in the camera.

I shoot RAWs with exposure as correct as I can get it* and everything else just more or less right (Cloudy +1, medium setting, normal curve) because I'll alter it when I develop it anyway.

I like PS as it gives me enjoyment when i see it being used badly:

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

What we can all probably agree on is that if anyone heads towards the 'filters' drop-down they should probably be executed

What if you've got some fancy sharpening and noise reduction plugins in your filter drop down menu?

I don't really care about how it's achieved if the end result is good – and nor does anyone who looks at your pictures. People being purists about anything is rather tedious imo.

I quite enjoy using PS and faffing about with pics – imo it's a big part of the advantage/skill involved in digital photography. You're only impressing yourself by not using it to the full.

If you need to use PS extensively, you need photography lessons.

only if you believe cameras are perfect 🙂

If you need to use PS extensively, you need photography lessons.

I use Lightroom extensively rather than Photoshop, but your statement is poopy poo.

It's fine trotting out the "get it right in-camera" line if all you want is realistic portraits and landscapes, but there are a lot of things you simply can't get right in camera.

None of these would have been possible in-camera.

Now, generally I do expose carefully (though all of the above were originally fairly low-contrast so in these cases there was a lot of leeway) but it's still heavy processing. Indeed it's processing that could theoretically be done in the darkroom – it's extremely rare that I clone anything out or otherwise alter the content of the image, but I do heavily modify how that content is processed.

I'm not really bothered about technical stuff like that though…it doesnt always result in a good image, it results in a well exposed image which isnt always right for every situation.

There's no harm in understanding your tools. Even if you aim to produce a dark image of a dark subject, 'overexposing' and then pulling back the exposure in processing can be good, because it reduces noise and can let you do more if/when you change your mind about how to process it. Likewise even if you want a light image, sometimes you want to 'underexpose' for a faster shutter speed or to increase noise. All just the same as push- or pull-processing in the days of film.

Saying this tool or that tool is somehow wrong or only used by idiots is just foolish. It's all about understanding your tools, understanding what you want to create, and slotting those two things together.