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I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone ...
Updated: Jun 29, 2008 3:06am BST
Work from the darkroom days. No Photoshopping, only caustic chemicals ...
Updated: Jul 04, 2008 8:26pm BST
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(PS - apologies if the page looks goofy, offset, hard to read font colors, etc. I'm working on it. SmugMug isn't the easiest site to modify....)
That periodical pontificator of photoshopping, “Popular Photography,” has an editorial in its June 2008 issue extolling praise on photographs which have “lots of depth and supernaturally rich colors.” The article then lists a set of instructions on how to convert your own photographs into fairytale objects, compliments of a (far more talented than me) photographer they are interviewing.
Do a GIS on “sunset” and you’ll be inundated with blueberry-colored skies blending into red-hot orange horizons with a full moon reflecting off the green-blue ocean water. Nice! Tell me where I can see that sunset? Try searching for “sunrise, Washington DC” and see what you get. I can personally attest to the fact that the DC metro area is so humid most mornings that the best photograph of a sunrise you’ll ever get is a light orange glow diffused by a ton of light blue-gray haze. That’s what you’d actually see if you were there. Never have I seen a sunrise so orange that it silhouettes the dome of the Capitol. Yet that’s what you get when you do an image search for sunrises on the National Mall.
Have you ever seen Crayola’s “Sky Blue” crayon? It’s a light blue. It’s a light blue because the sky is light blue. Please let me know if you see a photograph of the sky on the cover of “Popular Photography” that matches the color of Sky Blue.
I love playing with Photoshop as much as the next geek, and I’ve been playing with it for about 2 months now. And like most amateur photographers new to the field, I immediately subject my poor unwitting photographs to each trick I learn, post it to the web, then sit back and revel in my powers of saturation alteration. So I’m down with fairytale photographs and blueberry colored skies. In fact I personally enjoy de-saturating certain colors to make other colors stand out—that’s certainly not reality. But for the sake of photography itself, please at least tell me what you’ve done to your photograph.
In my tiny unknown stand against the subterfuge of reality in digital photography, I’ve noted below each of my photographs which, if any, image editing controls have been altered. The controls listed after “Raw Definition” are the adjustments made to Camera Raw’s default values. Not that Raw’s default conversion values epitomize reality, but the idea is that anyone could potentially take my original CR2 file and replicate my adjustments to arrive at the final posted image. Was the sky really that blue, or did I increase the saturation? Did I wait for the light to hit the tree just right to get a deep black shadow, or did I just clip my blacks? After “Photoshop” I list what destructive edits I’ve done to the photograph. In my current diminutive capacity of image editing skills, this is usually limited to brushing out cat hair.
Viva la honesty.
That periodical pontificator of photoshopping, “Popular Photography,” has an editorial in its June 2008 issue extolling praise on photographs which have “lots of depth and supernaturally rich colors.” The article then lists a set of instructions on how to convert your own photographs into fairytale objects, compliments of a (far more talented than me) photographer they are interviewing.
Do a GIS on “sunset” and you’ll be inundated with blueberry-colored skies blending into red-hot orange horizons with a full moon reflecting off the green-blue ocean water. Nice! Tell me where I can see that sunset? Try searching for “sunrise, Washington DC” and see what you get. I can personally attest to the fact that the DC metro area is so humid most mornings that the best photograph of a sunrise you’ll ever get is a light orange glow diffused by a ton of light blue-gray haze. That’s what you’d actually see if you were there. Never have I seen a sunrise so orange that it silhouettes the dome of the Capitol. Yet that’s what you get when you do an image search for sunrises on the National Mall.
Have you ever seen Crayola’s “Sky Blue” crayon? It’s a light blue. It’s a light blue because the sky is light blue. Please let me know if you see a photograph of the sky on the cover of “Popular Photography” that matches the color of Sky Blue.
I love playing with Photoshop as much as the next geek, and I’ve been playing with it for about 2 months now. And like most amateur photographers new to the field, I immediately subject my poor unwitting photographs to each trick I learn, post it to the web, then sit back and revel in my powers of saturation alteration. So I’m down with fairytale photographs and blueberry colored skies. In fact I personally enjoy de-saturating certain colors to make other colors stand out—that’s certainly not reality. But for the sake of photography itself, please at least tell me what you’ve done to your photograph.
In my tiny unknown stand against the subterfuge of reality in digital photography, I’ve noted below each of my photographs which, if any, image editing controls have been altered. The controls listed after “Raw Definition” are the adjustments made to Camera Raw’s default values. Not that Raw’s default conversion values epitomize reality, but the idea is that anyone could potentially take my original CR2 file and replicate my adjustments to arrive at the final posted image. Was the sky really that blue, or did I increase the saturation? Did I wait for the light to hit the tree just right to get a deep black shadow, or did I just clip my blacks? After “Photoshop” I list what destructive edits I’ve done to the photograph. In my current diminutive capacity of image editing skills, this is usually limited to brushing out cat hair.
Viva la honesty.