Post Production

trooney

I'm curious as to the amount of processing treatment people give their shots. Or at least, what the average amount is? I usually mess about with the levels, run an unsharp filter and maybe a crop. Now and again I might remove things such as overhead lines or suchlike, but, to my mind, anything more than that is getting into the realms of what people refer to as 'cheating'. Don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to 'cheating', but mostly my adjustments are within the above parameters.
Obviously for the purposes of this thread I'm referring to digital shots and tweaking with software after.

Fajitas!

As Julie said a while back, I'm not playing a game, so I don't know why I'd be cheating

I do whatever I feel nessicary to get the photograph I want. Whether that's just some curves/adjustment levels, or complex colour and blur adjustments, I'll do it. It's still a photograph, and part of the production of it.

trooney

Fajitas! wrote:

As Julie said a while back, I'm not playing a game, so I don't know why I'd be cheating

I do whatever I feel nessicary to get the photograph I want. Whether that's just some curves/adjustment levels, or complex colour and blur adjustments, I'll do it. It's still a photograph, and part of the production of it.

Agreed. I don't consider it cheating either - hence the inverted comma's on 'cheating'. I don't have a set amount of playing about with a shot. I'll do whatever it will take to make it the photo that I like best in that regard too. But usually it only takes a bit of messing about with levels and such.
I think people who consider it cheating are mostly people who don't use such methods at all (the non photogs rather than the photogs). But are none the wiser, unless informed. Up 'til then they're more likely to assume what they're seeing is as it was captured by the lens and only apply their 'cheating' rule if you tell them something was done to the photo on a computer.

Morlar

I do levels, a curves layer, and unsharp mask sometimes lots (more mixing raw exposures of the same shot and so on).

I think adding in elements of other photos isnt photography - its digital art or a montage (even rocky had a montage : ).

Removing things like skin imperfections or bits of rubbish on the ground is allowed but not compulsory and can be easily overdone. Sometimes leavnig in imperfections can make them more interesting - it really depends on the picture.

oshead

Cheating is a bit strong of a word. There is nothing wrong with trying to make an image look more appealing. Mostly I alter the white balance, exposure levels and contrast from within Lightroom.

Dave

latchiko

With me, it really depends on the shot. I will always bring a shot into PS and tweak it, but how much tweaking involved is dependant on the shot. Sometimes it's small levels/curves adjustments and some sharpening, other times the actual image is completely changed so that it's more like what I saw rather than what the camera saw (more due to my limitations than those of the camera).
As for 'cheating', there is nothing worse than somebody saying "did you use photoshop?". Immediately they assume that the photo isn't real any more. If a landscape artist is painting a nice rural scene and a shiny new car parks in his view, is he cheating if he doesn't paint the car? :rolleyes:

elven

What is it that you mean when you say doing more than levels/crop/sharpen/clone? You would be hard pushed to find much else to do that doesn't involve a montage of some sort.

Most of the other stuff I do would be local adjustments to tone, contrast and sharpening. I'm in love with the old gradient map with soft light blend mode just now, too, a sort of wimpy version of mark's bleach bypass...

Blending modes are fabulous

City-Exile

I'm not good enough with PSE to do anything too fancy.
A bit of level adjustment and cropping is as much as I've managed...

trooney

Everybody seems to be working off the same page alright. I guess I was curious to see if that was the case, or did people go further (or not).
I feel cheated when people look down on one of my photos because they know I tweaked the levels or whatever and they, all of a sudden, are totally turned off a shot that seconds before they may have been enthralled by.

City-Exile

trooney wrote:

I feel cheated when people look down on one of my photos because they know I tweaked the levels or whatever and they, all of a sudden, are totally turned off a shot that seconds before they may have been enthralled by.

Photo manipulation was around long before Photoshop!

trooney

City-Exile wrote:

Photo manipulation was around long before Photoshop!

Thats my point, in a way. A photo is then seen to have been 'manipulated'. Somehow taking any prestige it may have had down in the eyes of people who don't have the same affinity for photography. Philistines, if you will

sineadw

We were talking about this at the flickr meet last week. I was in a recording studio a few weeks back, listening to the band and the engineers talk about the different tracks they'd laid down and what needed to be done to each - bring up the frequency of the bass drum here, bring down the guitar top range there... It struck me - no-one ever complains about musicians tweaking their sound. No-one ever says "I only EVER listen to live music - albums are cheating!" Don't get why its sooo different for photographers when it seem to me to be almost exactly the same process.

I'm only getting into photoshop at teh moment, so in answer to your question ( ) not very much, but its only out of a slowly disappearing ignorance and a lot of laziness.

City-Exile

Just on your point, Sinéad, you often hear great acclaim for record producers.
Someone who has the skill to make an average group of musicians, actually sound good.
Either way, if a photograph is good, it will always be good, regardless of modifications.

On a slightly related note, I had a conversation, recently, about a colleague. She had bleach blonde hair, false nails, tinted eyelashes, make-up, a push-up bra, fake tan & wore high heels. In so many ways, she's cheating, yet she was deemed to be attractive and stylish. (Not by me, I can assure you)

My conclusion, however, you can never trust women, as they're born to decieve!

Paulw

City-Exile wrote:

My conclusion, however, you can never trust women, as they're born to decieve!

And now you're just asking for every woman to contradict you. LOL.

But, photography editing is necessary if you shoot in raw. You just have to use Photoshop or something similar.

Every photograph is edited in some form, even film photos.

Roen

Very minimal, really the only thing I do in PS now is USM (and here's a tip folks, convert your image to Lab mode and select the Lightness channel, then u can apply loads more USM than u normally could).

Lightroom has just about enough to produce a finished print I think.