Photoshop, Good Or Evil?

[Daryk Campbell Sr]

F&F, how deep should one take your question? I consider them both Art to some extent. Some may ask how, I answer by asking "Who is holding the fish? Why are they not shown? " In these questions the idea of both of the pictures being art can be realized.

The first one has been altered, but (not haveing a knowledge of photoshop's workings) I don't know to what extent. How would you present this picture? Would you let someone else's interpretation be the ruling factor?

( Please don't read these as me being a smartellic, it is meant is casual conversation tone)

[cnr]

Illustration, Photography, Video. What determines if any of these visual techniques are "art"? I like this definition: "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects". I think if the image was the creative effort of a vision that began with a pre-visualized concept, then it's art. Using Photoshop does not necessarily negate the creative value of an image, it's just a tool. How it's used is what makes the difference. I began my art career as an illustrator and I can tell you that Al is spot on in his use of Photoshop as a artistic tool to achieve his imagery. I have also seen some very talented illustrators copy a good photograph using traditional media (paint, chalk, pencil, whatever) and I would not call what they do as art, just a good rendering of someone else's well thought out creative photo (art).

[Chief Grey Bear]

Chief noted that Ron Kruger Photoshops a lot of the images he has for sale on his website. Most are combinations of two photos, one for the background and one for the subject. Chief said that if he was paying for a photographic image, he wouldn't want it to be Photoshopped. But is Ron passing off those images as "real" photos? I don't think so.

Not any more. I see the discription of the photos on the site has changed.

I think you pretty much covered my thoughts on it. Art is art, pictures are pictures. As long as neither is falsely represented to be the other, I'm ok with it.

Exactly.

[Feathers and Fins]

F&F, how deep should one take your question? I consider them both Art to some extent. Some may ask how, I answer by asking "Who is holding the fish? Why are they not shown? " In these questions the idea of both of the pictures being art can be realized. The first one has been altered, but (not haveing a knowledge of photoshop's workings) I don't know to what extent. How would you present this picture? Would you let someone else's interpretation be the ruling factor? ( Please don't read these as me being a smartellic, it is meant is casual conversation tone)

To me both pictures I posted are nice ( then again i caught it lol ) Art to me would be if I had the talent to have painted it, I still have the glowtrout hanging in my outdoor room and many people like it. I put a lot of time and effort into creating it, so by the creating it I could call it art! Im not sure what the answer is I enjoy Al's painting I also enjoy some of the beauty of photography and the eye of the potographer. Perhaps there is the Answer the EYE. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.

[eric1978]

I think it's up to the individual artist or photographer to decide for himself. If using enhancement techniques makes you feel cheap or phony then it probably is. If it makes you feel like a cheater, then you probably are. But if you're not into purity, and technology and the modern tools excite you, then that's fine, too. To each his own.

I'm into woodworking, and the thought of putting any kind of metal fastener into a piece of fine furniture is a huge turnoff to me, and I'd rather not build something at all if I'm not going to use traditional all wood joinery. Other folks use pocket screws or brad nails in every project they do. On the other hand, some guys use only hand tools, no power...true purists. I think those guys are about as nutty as a squirrel turd given the convenience of modern power tools. I like hand tools to finesse a joint or to smooth a surface, but there's no way I wanna mill down a hundred board feet of lumber with a handsaw and handplane. So the point is, none of us are right...we just have different perspectives on what methods yield the most enjoyment and why. I think that applies to most hobbies, arts and crafts.

Obviously photoshopping a picture for purely dishonest purposes is a different story. But tinkering with an image for artistic purposes? I see nothing wrong with it, as long as it's not presented as genuine and unaltered, and the artist doesn't feel all dirty about it afterward.

[Al Agnew]

Great comments, everybody. It strikes me that photography can be either journalism, art (or craft if you prefer), or both at the same time. If it is pure craft or art, then just about anything goes. But if it is supposed to be journalism--if it is supposed to be a real recording of something that was seen or happened, it better not be altered to any great extent. If a wildlife photographer advertises that he takes all his shots in the wild with real wild animals, then he better not be caught using the businesses I mentioned earlier to get shots of mountain lions. And if a photo is supposed to be recording something real, say to accompany a newspaper or news magazine article (or on the internet), it better not be Photoshopped beyond the simple adjustments to exposure and color balance. Such a photo can end up being true art, but that's not its main goal.

I use Photoshop in lots of ways in my artwork. It has largely taken the place of color studies and lots and lots of compositional sketches in my work. For instance, right now I'm working on a big painting with four wolves. The original idea came from playing around with some of my wolf photos (a couple of them actually taken of wild wolves in Yellowstone but others that were taken in a captive situation) trying to come up with an interesting grouping. I imported all the photos into Photoshop, removed the backgrounds so it was just the wolves, transferred them to a blank file, and started moving them around, deleting some, enlarging others. I didn't really have any clear idea of what I was aiming for, just looking for inspiration. I suddenly saw that I had four wolves whose bodies were turned in different directions, but I thought, "Hey, if I just turn all the heads so they are looking in the same direction, I might have something interesting. I can place them on a knoll so that the faces are on different planes...". So I took the faces off some other wolf photos, transposed them onto the bodies of the wolves I had, and bingo, I liked it. It slightly reminded me of the Presidents' faces on Mount Rushmore for some reason. But with the bodies in different poses but the faces all directed the same way, it mainly told a story of four wolves going about their individual business, loosely hanging with each other, when suddenly something attracts their attention. I had a mountain background photo that I'd been wanting to paint for a while, so I imported it into the composition, drew in a snowy knoll with the airbrush tool, added a few background trees, and I had a nice composition for my painting. I altered the colors so the various photos used matched, added sunlight and shadows on the wolves (I wanted them in sunshine, but the photos I had were taken on a cloudy day), added a few elements and changed a few others to strengthen the composition, and I had a great color study that would be the main reference I'd use in the actual painting. I still had to draw out the wolves on paper, full size that they'd be in the painting, and in the drawing of them on paper I "fixed" a lot of things that were screwed up in the photos and in the merging of faces onto other bodies--there always seem to be things in a photo that aren't as attractive or are awkward appearing that I don't want to copy in the painting. But basically, the composing of the painting in Photoshop saved me from doing a LOT of sketching and drawing, not to mention that using Photoshop really gave me the idea in the first place. In the old days I would have done a bunch of thumbnail sketches until I got something I liked, then I would have sketched out the wolves full size, probably three or four times for each wolf until I got them just the way I wanted them, using my reference photos anytime I ran into a piece of a wolf that I wasn't sure looked right. Then I would have cut each wolf out and moved them around in relation to each other until I had the placement perfect, then another sketch, full size, of the background, placing the grouping of wolves on the background, and then finally I would have MAYBE been ready to paint, but a small color study would have always been helpful in working out the color palette I'd use in the painting. All that is now done in Photoshop except for the actual final sketches of the wolves. So you can see another reason I really like Photoshop!

[ness]

Some interesting thoughts.

There isn't really a right answer on the original question. Most people assume photographs capture a 'real' image, but that's just not so. Neither film nor sensors can see as much in a scene as the human eye can. They just can't capture the very darkest and very lightest details. And the interpretation of color is never perfect. Since the beginning of photography people have grappled with these problems, and we still are.

With film, you made and exposure and kinda had to live with it. You could tweak things when the print was made by varying the amount of light that hit the photographic paper. You could darken or lighten portions of the print by increasing the length of time light hit a certain part while shading another part with a mask, and vice versa. Different film types had different contrast and saturation properties. 'Kodachrome, gimme the nice bright colors...' was talking about just that. If you shot film, you could get a lot more saturation with that, or Fuji Velvia and Reala. If you shot under incandescent light, you bought another film, or suffered the yellow cast with no way to fix it after the shot. If you had your prints made, you likely had a machine try to adjust it to 'average' when it printed, rather than just take it as it saw the negative. And, remember, you had a meter tell you or your camera how to expose it anyway.

Today's sensors are a huge leap forward. The dynamic range (range from darks to lights) are expanding. The sensitivity is increasing exponentially (The top of the line Nikon digitals get 125,000 ISO equivalent; I remember being excited with 400 film) The White Balance allows shooting in all kinds of light from sun to incandescent to sodium to florescent.

Photographers have been doing things to make the picture look better all along. Not better than reality -- better than the technology could reproduce. Ansel Adams himself looked at the negative and the print as two separate processes, comparing the negative to a composers score, and the print to the performance. Sooo much room for interpretation in the 'performance'.

Great photographers have many of the same skills of great artists. They know composition, pattern, light, color, all that stuff. A great photograph has the elements of a great painting. They are truly art. If you see a photograph and you kinda think, 'Wow' and it makes you want to look at it, you've encountered a great photograph. Whether it be a spectacular moment in time, a beautiful scene you wish you could step into, or anything else that stimulates emotion...that's art.

When you understand what makes a great photograph, you appreciate it more. I see 'neat' stuff all the time...things that tickle that 'Wow' button. But, I know enough to see whether it's pure trickery (usually) or a dedicated photographer that put in the time to catch the subject at the perfect moment in time, compose it correctly and get the technical part right. The phony stuff usually exposes itself in one way or another. So, I'm fairly comfortable I can discern between a photoshop creation and a photograph. But not always!

When you significantly alter the reality of a scene that is presented as reality, I think there's an obligation to disclose it. I would. But not everyone will -- and you should be a little skeptical if your brain tells you some photo is absolutely AMAZING!

[Bird Watcher]

This is the same kind of arguement that rages perodically on the photography forums I frequent.

First of all, none of the pictures I posted were altered in PhotoShop. I'm old school. I use light, angle, focal length, good lenses, exposure, f-stops, tripods and sometimes filters to get it right (or as close as possible) at time of capture. There simply is no substitute for good light, and over the decades, I've learned to dance with the light. I believe the snarky remark was made on some flower shots. I've developed a proceedure for macro and close up work that utilizes f-22, a special stabalizing spike I built myself and professional flash to get a rich and clear shot. (Actually, I use fill-flash and tripods more often than not for all my photography.) They aren't the typical snapshots most are used to seeing, so someone who doesn't know much about it presumes they were altered in PhotoShop somehow to make them look that good.

I'm also very picky about what I keep. When I do my initial edit, anything that looks like it needs "fixing in PhotoShop" gets a quick trip to the trash bin. I know a great deal about photography and I utilize that experience and some tricks to get good shots at time of capture. Most digital photographers shoot in auto and process in manual. I take the opposite approach. I'm into photography, not computer games.

Now, just as was the case in the darkroom, I can usually improve a picture slightly in post processing, tweaking exposure, hue, contrast, colors etc., but I always keep these tweaks to a minimum and most of the time simply convert RAW images to JPEGs. I always try to keep post processing to a minimum. Processing always has been a part of photography, and it is a integregal part of digital photography. It's just that with digital we have more control than we did with slides or film. Straight from the camera is not "pure" either. It is "processed" by the camera. Even if you simply upload pictures from you P&S or phone, you are relying on the camera to do all the processing for you. Digital files must be processed to convert lines of information into images. The more you know about it, the more you want to control this necessary part of the process, and if you are submitting digital files for large prints or publications, you are expected to do this.

I have PhotoShop and I know how to use it, but mostly I use the PP software that came with my camera for minor adjustments and conversions and often do some tweaking to the JPEGs with ACDsee (mostly for internet use, which is much different than print or publication uses). I also use ACDsee to downsize my original files, which run from 21 to 25 MB, to the pitifully small 150 KB size for internet.

Where PhotoShop has gotten a bad reputation is with dishonest uses, and the problem is serious enough that newspapers have software that automatically detects when layers have been used. Generally, anything goes on the internet, but it is a no-no for print. I have used PhotoShop to blend a couple of my images into a few pictures to achieve a better background for some wildlife shots and to put a moon in some shots, which we used to do with slides by using a double exposure. Most of these blended shots are posted on my fineartamerica website and are listed as "digital art," not "photography." I do it because that is what sells for prints, and it is understood that they have been "PhotoShopped." (By the way, this is not as easy as many think and can take many hours to do properly.)

I don't really consider moving sliders and clicking a mouse as "art." In fact, I consider even the best of photography a craft, not an art. It's something I've learned to do though decades of practice, (like being a good bricklayer or carpenter) not some natural talent I was born with.

The bottom line is, despite the advances in digital (auto everyting) photography and the power of PP softwares, the three main things that distinguish a good photograph from a snapshot are the same as always: the quality of light, exactly what you put into the frame and exactly when you snap the shutter.

so you are saying that your pictures from your website that Chief posted "coyote hunting at dusk" or "bass with jitterbug" or "velvet swamp buck" were not photoshopped, but rather created through your mastery of lenses, light quality, and focal length?

[Bird Watcher]

I didn't know he posted any. I only saw where he accused me of it on some flower shots that were not. Obviously I do a good enough job with a camera that some think a few shots must be photoshopped when they are not, and obviously some don't realize that copying my photos from my website to post here is a copyright infingment. All shot on my website have the copyright watermark across them to warn people against breaking the law in this way, so the violation is very clear. Where are those shots?

I said in my post that I do blend some shots for print sales. Bass Attacking Jitterbug is not Photoshopped, but the other two are. Here's a couple more that are a blend of two of my shots. I've never tried to hide anything. Do you like them?

They weren't posted here. No copyright infringement, unless I comitted that by typing the title. On this site I only saw a link to your site and that's where I saw them. Some of your underwater photos of fish I think are pretty cool, but some of the blended photos remind me a little of the postcards that you would see on the rack by the register at some of the hillbilly junction type rest areas. To each their own though and ulitmately it only matters what your customers think of them. If they buy them, then I guess you are going in the right direction.

[ColdWaterFshr]

Photography is really all fake anyway, isn't it? Its just a visual reproduction, so where do you draw the line between real and artistic manipulation? Journalistic photography is one thing that should be kept honest, but anything else you have to realize its been tarted up or manipulated in some way.

For that matter, there isn't much music that you buy that isn't processed, overdubbed, layered or whatever (it didn't get recorded in one live take). I don't know many people that are snobby enough to listen to only "live" recordings, eschewing all the rest.

My older sister is the Ron Burgundy of photography and photoshopping . . . thats right, she's sort've a big deal. Not landscape stuff or flowers or sports, but art with a story embedded in the visual and yes it is all heavily photoshopped, but still created by her. She's travelled the world, had gallery openings, hung out with movie stars that are fans of hers, even did a Time Magazine cover-shot. Prints sell for up to $12k and she can't make them fast enough. Most of the kids used in her stuff are Paul Dallas' nieces and nephews. Check it out here: www.julieblackmon.com