What is manipulated photography to you?

Ruu_Old

I entered a few pics into a local photography competition and it was a nice experience to get a professional judging on my photos. Now there were a few categories, General, Manipulated, People, Nature, Youth and Architecture. Anyway the best in category (General) and overall best in show, used a sepia tone in photoshop, she mentioned.

Many people argued that this was manipulation and should have been under the Manipulated category. I wanted to know what you people thought. What is manipulation to you or how do you see it?

I don't really see adjusting the color balance or adjustment of exposure and contrast as manipulation but I'm still not sure. Anyone got any thoughts on this? Thanks.

Fenster

I would consider it to be anything greater than being sized down, which makes most of my work as falling under "manipulated as fcuk"

unreggd

Technically it is minor manipulation, but I'd say anything under the Manipulation would have hadta been majorly PS'd

Calina

Interesting.

I entered a major international sports photography competition during the year whereby there was one category for digitally manipulated photographs. After that the rule was the original shot could not be digitally manipulated in any other category. I emailed for clarification and was told that cropping was essentially okay (although depending on the crop it could fall foul of their minimum resolution requirements).

After that, the photographs had to be un postprocessed.

From that, I took it to read that messing around with contrasts and levels and curves would fall foul of the rules which left the question of how you managed to convert a photograph to black and white if you didn't pull it in bnw off the camera.

DaireQuinlan

Theres a couple of these sorts of pools on flickr that require the same thing. 'the picture, straight from the camera, without any manipulation'. This is all well and good, but it definately doesn't cover, for example, film work. Your negative is never (or at least extraordinarily rarely) representative of the final print. If you're scanning even more so. I guess though for a truely unmanipulated scanned film image levels adjustments alone would probably count. I'd probably include minor spotting, cropping, sharpening to remove scanner softness, and very possibly some small local contrast changes (ie dodging/burning).

Fenster

Not even that is acceptable for a lot of press photography.

If anything, I think taking your photos with a mindset of it being a press photo gives good discipline for getting a great photo out of the camera. I know I'm the lazy type who thinks to himself "ah shure, I can fix it in Photoshop"

Steffano2002

To me, manipulating a photograph is opening it with PS (or any other photo editing software) and doing something to it (other than resizing). But that's just me. I'm a very "black or white" kind of guy...

Dara Robinson

Personally I think that croping is perfectly fine. After that I would be skeptical.

I'd have to say that as long as the changes are minor and do not change the nature of the original. Changes to brightness and contrast I would see as ok (again, minor ones), saturation level and maybe some slight colour changes. But the the combination of these should not change the picture, more reveal what the photographer was trying to capture but could not for what ever reason.

Xios

I'm with steffano on this, but i think that a simple one click conversion to b&w or sepia should be allowed, as this can be shot with a digi cam while taking the image, it's a practicality thing, why take 3 photos when you can take one and convert the others later.
But tones, colours and cloning are banzored.

DaireQuinlan

From a digicam point of view, I'd probably agree. I was specifically talking about scanned film though. People tend to try and apply the same restrictions to it as their digital 'straight from the camera' images. This would result in an unusable image. Look at it this way, what is your astonishingly clever camera actually doing when it takes the shot ? what settings have you got ? auto white balance ? sharpening ? vivid color or something equivalent ? auto contrast ? A lot of these things are actual defaults applied to an image that comes 'straight from a digicam'. Not withstanding raw shooting or similar.

JMcL

In general I would consider manipulation involving the addition or removal of parts of the image, radical changes in colour, etc. The question is, where do you draw the line? Mike Johnson had a post a while back regarding his restoration of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" for the fine art print he was offering which makes interesting reading. Contrast adjustments would normally be considered as not really manipulation, and would usually be necessary. Here however, different levels of contrast actually radically alter the interpretation one can put on the image.

I think the level of manipulation that is acceptable is very much dependent on the context. If you're talking about making a fine art print, then pretty much anything goes really, but if it's a press, forensic, or documentary image, then the level of manipulation permissable is much less, if any. Canon and Nikon are obviously aware of this, and are providing means in their top to allow original source images to be verifiable, by embedding checksums, GPS etc into the original files

magicbastarder

i wouldn't consider adjusting curves for brightness as manipulation, as long as it was done to the image as a whole, and done only for brightness. as someone pointed out, it's like adjusting exposure, which certainly would be allowed.

minikin

i wouldn't consider sepia toning manipulation in that sense - cloning / removing / combining elements of the image would be more like manipulation.

Toning, correcting the density/contrast or colour balance etc is post processing rather than manipulation.

Even the traditional purists whose work hangs on gallery walls would have no issue with selenium toning as it adds to archival performance (whilst also adding some colour)

DadaKopf

How long is a piece of string? People can talk about this until they're blue in the face and never agree.

There's no such thing as a perfect negative, and all good prints require manipulation. But with film, manipulation starts with choices regarding camera, lens, film, settings and ends not only with processing chemicals, printing paper, printing techniques, dodging, burning, photographic manipulations extend to the context beyond the frame - will it be displayed in a frame, a book, how will it be mounted, is it part of a series, is it part of a news article, is it in a gallery? It never ends.

The same applies to digital, it's just that more is possible.

Surely the question is: does the final image 'work'? Does it pay respect to the subject matter? Does it capture the creator's intentions? And the most important question: who cares?

Accident is also important in photography. Conversations like these, IMHO, have a subtext which implies that all photography is about control. The photographer's intentions can evolve after a photo has been taken.

This is why I love photography. It's a completely open vernacular. Nothing wrong with having fun, setting rules, I do it all the time! Whatever an image looks like, I'm just interested in its effect, and how different people express things differently.

I suppose I'm saying: it's *all* manipulation. Even the human brain is manipulated - the technology is the same, but can malfunction. The mind manipulates images, and sometimes when things go 'wrong' you get Wassily Kandinsky, or Van Gogh.

elven

DadaKopf wrote:

And the most important question: who cares?

Unfortunately, camera clubs. Especially the judges. And strange, strange people who don't realise there's a bigger picture with photography, when it comes to the process of capturing a 3D, living scene on a 2D, static, inanimate surface...

But thanks for verbalising (typing?!) pretty succinctly what I also think about the subject

Fajitas!

Everything is a manipulation...

magicbastarder

there's a hell of a difference between tweaking contrast and cloning someone out of a photo, though.

garvin

I'm fairly new to digital photography, but in the last 25years have never printed a negative straight , every image without exception was worked on. Some more than others . So dodging burning contrast adjustments are all normal and would not be seen as being got at

5uspect

I tend to use the idea of adding information to the image as a rule to where manipulation becomes unacceptable (in the sense of a competition etc)
Doing a levels/curves correction bumping up the colour dodging/burning etc doesn't add any new information to the data, it only removes it. Its almost the same as opening the aperature to blur out the background to remove the detail. Cloning in additional features etc does however add aditional information.

I have no problem with choppin' a photo (I quite enjoy it) but if additional information has been added then that needs to be mentioned when a photo is presented. This is nice cos it generally gets all us PS heads interested in learning the great skills that are out there. If someone turns up their nose at it I could care less, as Fajitas has pointed out everything is a manipulation so until you figure out how to get prints from your retinas get used to it.

P.S. Ruu did you get the D50 in the end?

Ruu_Old

5uspect, not yet but hopefully soon, stupid owning a house gets in the way sometimes.:mad:

Interesting to hear everyones opinions.

Fajitas!

magicbastarder wrote:

there's a hell of a difference between tweaking contrast and cloning someone out of a photo, though.

Ah yeah, but like, anything can be considered a manipulation, going back to film, the aperture you use when printing, your paper, and going to film, cloning, contrasts...it's all manipulating what's there. But I'm not saying that's a bad thing, in any way. In fact, manipulation is fantastic!

Placebo

personally, changing brightness/contrast of a photo is down right manipulation, consider a scene/potrait type photo where you calculated the aperture wrong, resulted in it being too bright, therefore changing the brightness contrast making it perfect, thats not your skill. But then again its how you want the photo to look which leads back to photography, art. Its grey area but changing the HUE OR COLOR BALANCE is absolute and utter manipulation, get your colour filters out ! personally i think if youre using digital then youre already manipulating your photo to begin with.. :rolleyes:

Fajitas!

Placebo wrote:

personally, changing brightness/contrast of a photo is down right manipulation, consider a scene/potrait type photo where you calculated the aperture wrong, resulted in it being too bright, therefore changing the brightness contrast making it perfect, thats not your skill. But then again its how you want the photo to look which leads back to photography, art. Its grey area but changing the HUE OR COLOR BALANCE is absolute and utter manipulation, get your colour filters out ! personally i think if youre using digital then youre already manipulating your photo to begin with.. :rolleyes:

But why is manipulation a bad thing?

And besides, knowing how to correctly do anything in digital is a skill.

Cameraman

All photographs are manipulated/artificial representations (film or digital) - they have to be, as they are a 2-dimensional representation of a 3-D scene. The acceptable degree of manipulation is just a personal preference.

photo.net gives a good working definition of what they consider manipulated/unmanipulated here

JMcL

Placebo wrote:

Its grey area but changing the HUE OR COLOR BALANCE is absolute and utter manipulation, get your colour filters out ! personally i think if youre using digital then youre already manipulating your photo to begin with.. :rolleyes:

I don't personally see any difference in putting an 81B filter in front of the lens and bumping up white balance in post production. The very thing colour filters change is hue and colour balance, and this is one of the greatest advantages of digital - reducing the filter requirements to a polariser, and possibly a bunch of ND grads. Does knowing that you have to put a filter in front of a piece of Velvia to correct a cast on long exposure due to reciprocity failure make you a better photographer? I don't think so, it just demonstrates an understanding of the limitations of your medium

magicbastarder

the worst manipulation of all has to be the use of a tobacco grad filter. or soft focus filters.

Fajitas!

Fancy adding Starburst filters to that list?

JMcL

Fajitas! wrote:

Fancy adding Starburst filters to that list?

Hee... David Noton had an entertaining column in Practical Photography a while back about his penchant for horrific filters in the 80s. It's online here (use the combo box to go to September 2006 - not way to link directly )

Borderfox

This is from the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year rules

Adjusting your image Digital adjustments are only acceptable if limited to minor cleaning work, levels, curves, colour, saturation and contrast work. The faithful representation of a natural form, behaviour or phenomenon must be maintained. Compositing and multiple exposures are not allowed. Sharpening is allowed. Cropping is allowed.

I would be happy with this interpretation.