Maybe I'm looking at it wrong but isn't using photo shop like cheating by doctoring up your photos? I'm new to photography I would like to learn from my bad photos instead of just fixing them. I maybe wrong about how photo shop works.
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Serious photographers in the film days had dark rooms where they developed their own photos. They dodged and burned and varied the chemicals and film types and used filters on their lenses and did everything else they could dream up in order to achieve the look that they wanted in their photos. It's nothing new.
Digital cameras don't capture light on film negatives. They capture raw data on a computer sensor. That data has to be processed to look good, very similar to film processing in many ways. Digital cameras all have built-in processors that adjust sharpness, contrast, saturation, etc. In-camera processors are the equivalent of the old 1-hour processing places for film. They're fast, but they don't give you the best quality results. To get the best results, you need to do a more thorough job of processing.
Obviously, Photoshop and other programs give you the ability to alter an image in MAJOR ways, if you want to - way beyond the capabilities of film processing in a dark room. But just because you use a computer program to process your photos, it doesn't mean that you have stopped being a photographer and have become a digital artist or whatever. If you want to create digital art, knock yourself out. As long as you're not a journalist who is creating images that are not real and then claiming that they are real images to back up one of your stories, then you're good. Go as crazy as you want to with digital creativity.
But if you just want to take photos and "develop" them as best you can without altering reality, you can (should) still use a good digital editing program to make your pictures look better than they are ever going to look coming straight out of your camera. Just look at 95% of all the snapshots of beautiful sunsets you see people post on facebook or wherever. They suck. People take snapshots and post them straight out of their camera, and the photos don't do any justice at all to the actual real-life beauty that inspired the person to take the picture in the first place. That's because they let their camera do the 1-hour photo lab deal on the picture, and it sucked. A pro photographer chooses the right settings, sets up the shot, and then spends some time developing the photo in order to get an end result that actually does represent the actual scene that he saw with his eyes. It often takes work to get a photo to end up at that point. It rarely happens when all you do is throw the camera up and snap a quick pic and then trust the camera to develop it for you.
In other words....heck no, it isn't cheating! It's WORK, and it gives you better results.
Last edited by Shane; 08-16-2013, 10:54 PM.Comment
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Thanks Shane for a great explanation of the process. I would like to start a small side business doing photography for special events after I get better with the camera. So is photo shop the best editing software?Comment
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Photoshop
Is photoshop the best their is maybe. But it really depends on what you are trying to do with your pictures. Most case lightroom, and premier are good for most editing. Such as adjusting lights and shadows and minor sharping. But for major alts, like removing a person from a picture CS6 content aware you can't go wrong. But Photoshop is very expensive if you buy, and there are package you can buy for like web production, that include photoshop and two or three other programs that illustrator or indesign. will you use everything you get for a high retail price probably not. But Adobe does offer trials so you can see what you can do with the software. CS6 is the last version to be on CD also, for the newer version you will have to pay a monthly subscription which I think is 19.99 or 29.99 right now, for promotional time. You can also go to places like best buy and B&H photo and buy educational version for a deeply discounted rate.Comment
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Shane I don't disagree with your explanation at all. I will say this though. I went to a Russell Graves photo seminar and he told me that he spends very little to any time post processing his photos. He believes in getting it right with just the camera. Now he did say that he will adjust them but nothing to serious and will do a photo in just a minute or so. Maybe he is that good with post processing I don't know. I wish he would post his photos on here more often.
Great photographer/videographer and very knowledgeable.Comment
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To me the only reason I have ever used photo shop was to scan and fix some old family photos If I don't get it right it was not meant to beComment
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