Photoshop yes or no?

harr

Currently getting into photography a bit more and have joined a local club, so every month we are given a subject to shoot..at end of month we are critiqued on our photos...last few months I have been marked down for not using photoshop ...me personally don't like photos that are photoshopped to death...
A lady in our group uses it so much her photos end up looking like a painting...
So how much photoshop is to much?
Should I start using it more,at the moment I only use to make small adjustments with the light...

MugMugs

Variant on your own style. Personally a little up in saturation in light room is all that's needed in a well taken photo.

magicbastarder

yep, depends on your style. most of what i use it for is colour balance, and tweaking exposure a bit, when working on digital shots.

CabanSail

When you work from RAW you need to process the images.

What you do is up to you.

Myksyk

Photoshop is an enormously deep and complex programme and undoubtedly (potentially) an extremely powerful tool for your digital photography.

IMHO, the issue is not whether there is too much processing ... it is about whether there is good or bad processing. I've seen photos where one slide of a slider constitutes 'too much photoshop' (usually the saturation slider)! On the other hand I've seen work involving a vast array of layering, masking, colour correction, sharpening, blending, tonal balancing, etc etc etc where the finished result is delicate, sympathetic and understated or perhaps striking, creative, artistic.

It's all there if you want to achieve certain things with your photography and if you are willing to put the work in to understand and use the programme competently.

Bear in mind it's a very demanding programme to learn and is a good example of 'a little knowledge is dangerous thing' when it comes to some of the results you see. Lightroom is probably a much better option for you initially. It is comparatively much much easier to learn and can dramatically improve you results (beware the saturation slider!). It (or some other RAW converter like ACR) is of course required if you shoot in RAW, which is recommended.

venlo

no,

Photoshop is digital art,

photography is analogue

magicbastarder

i'd argue ACR is much better to start with than LR (which i still haven't gotten my head around) - everything i hear about LR's strengths is in workflow.

5uspect

If you're shooting RAW you'll naturally have to push your images a bit exposure and sharpness wise due to their natural flatness. There are a lot of other basic global adjustments such as noise reduction, lens distortion correction that you can and should look at. These I really have no problem with and I typically use in my workflow as needed and I expect everyone should.

Similarly there are a lot of ways to convert to black and white and all are valid.

I rarely, if ever, perform local adjustemts such as cloning out things I don't like or making significant changes to parts of an image. The biggest adjustment I might make is a gradient filter to a sky.

I find that as you progress you tend to move towards this mentality. When you start off you want to try everything and the power of Photoshop is irresistible. Unfortunately beginners suck at it and the results often speak for themselves. But it's a necessary thing I think.

So it's all part of the learning curve. There's a lot going on in a digital camera from a technical perspective so it's worth learning how a camera acquires data and how that affects things like noise in an ADC or the lin-log response of the sensor. Photoshop and more specifically CameraRAW are just tools that you will have to understand because to get the best out of an image doesn't mean getting it right in camera.

There's also an art to editing. So you need to couple an artistic vision, either bold or restrained, with a technological mastery that allows you to understand what this tool you use can really do.

CabanSail

The ACR framework is the same as that in LR.

Myksyk

magicbastarder wrote: »

i'd argue ACR is much better to start with than LR (which i still haven't gotten my head around) - everything i hear about LR's strengths is in workflow.

In terms of processing, LR's Develop module and ACR are the very same thing ... with different interfaces.

magicbastarder

i tried using LR and it was trying to do a load of stuff i didn't need it to do. it's the stuff it does which is not the same as ACR which i found too much of a faff.

5uspect

magicbastarder wrote: »

i tried using LR and it was trying to do a load of stuff i didn't need it to do. it's the stuff it does which is not the same as ACR which i found too much of a faff.

Yeah, I can manage my own files, thank you very much. ACR edits RAW files and that's all I need.

magicbastarder

anyway, back to the topic - if you're using photoshop as a crutch, you're way too heavy on the processing side and need to work on the 'using the camera' side of things. silk purse, sows ear, etc.

harr

Thanks for the replys so far...I do shoot raw and I only tweak my photos where needed in LR ...would it be worth my time doing a night class or similar to help get to grips with processing my photos?
While It has taken me a number of years to feel fully confident taking good photos , I feel i am confident enough that I know what I am doing camera wise..finally.

endacl

venlo wrote: »

no,

Photoshop is digital art,

photography is analogue

Digital photography ain't.

And, yes. I know what your response will be...

Anyway, OP. Yes, I do use PS. Usually for subtle alterations, such as those that would have formed part of the developing process in the old 'analogue' days. Sometimes I go nuts manipulating images. Because it's fun.

endacl

harr wrote: »

Thanks for the replys so far...I do shoot raw and I only tweak my photos where needed in LR ...would it be worth my time doing a night class or similar to help get to grips with processing my photos?
While It has taken me a number of years to feel fully confident taking good photos , I feel i am confident enough that I know what I am doing camera wise..finally.

You'll learn nothing in a night class you won't get from a YouTube tutorial. And you'll only get what they teach you. If you use iTunes, there are comprehensive (free) courses available in iTunes University. Once you get the basics down, you'll know what questions to ask YouTube.

venlo

magicbastarder wrote: »

anyway, back to the topic - if you're using photoshop as a crutch, you're way too heavy on the processing side and need to work on the 'using the camera' side of things. silk purse, sows ear, etc.

+1

how can a doctored photo ever be better than an original?

CabanSail

venlo wrote: »

how can a doctored photo ever be better than an original?

Doctored? Sorry???

What do you call "original"?

Photographs have always been processed, long before you were born. In the days of film that would be done in the darkroom and the equivalent processes are carried out digitally. Long before digital cameras were a viable option negatives were scanned and then processed digitally for commercial work. This predates even Photoshop.

There is not much difference between a straight print from a negative and a RAW file. They are both usually both flat and lifeless.

Myksyk

venlo wrote: »

how can a doctored photo ever be better than an original?

In digital photography, when shooting in RAW, a well processed photo is almost alway better than the original.

When shooting in jpeg, you just chose to let the photo-editing software/algorithms (the 'doctoring programme) in your camera do the processing for you.

grogi

Myksyk wrote: »

Photoshop is an enormously deep and complex programme and undoubtedly (potentially) an extremely powerful tool for your digital photography.

And expensive...

grogi

CabanSail wrote: »

Doctored? Sorry???

What do you call "original"?

Photographs have always been processed, long before you were born. In the days of film that would be done in the darkroom and the equivalent processes are carried out digitally. Long before digital cameras were a viable option negatives were scanned and then processed digitally for commercial work. This predates even Photoshop.

There is not much difference between a straight print from a negative and a RAW file. They are both usually both flat and lifeless.

In digital photography there is no "original". What is saved into RAW file is already processed. Even the stuff that comes out from the sensor is just numbers and needs to be processed (in a monitor for instance) to be visualised.

endacl

grogi wrote: »

And expensive...

*ahem* or not...

Web Graphic Designer

venlo wrote: »

no,
Photoshop is digital art, photography is analogue

Not sure what is meant by that. Apart from Polaroid instants, photography is in most cases is just digital pixels, and Psd is one tool for manipulating such pixels. Even if an image is cropped, rotated or auto leveled it becomes digitally manipulated.

There is Photoshop 'lite' versions out there, and even your most basic of software can 'fix' most images.
Mac: In Preview simply open, tools, adjust colour to alter various levels.
PC: XnView, Infraview (all free) etc can do similar.

magicbastarder

Web Graphic Designer wrote: »

Not sure what is meant by that.

Just trolling for a reaction I'll bet.

CabanSail

grogi wrote: »

In digital photography there is no "original". What is saved into RAW file is already processed. Even the stuff that comes out from the sensor is just numbers and needs to be processed (in a monitor for instance) to be visualised.

The RAW file is data from the sensor. Unfortunately there is some adjustment in most cameras and it not linear but has some compression in the shadows and highlights added (would much prefer the file to be linear) there can also be some data compression too, normally lossless, to make the files a bit smaller.

Still a RAW File is essentially a data dump from the sensor. It is from this data set that a photograph can be produced. There is a small jpeg image embedded in the file for display purposes but it is not the "original" but can be used for reference. Then the RAW converter will interpret the data with the default settings and show that as an image.

Effects

venlo wrote: »

no,

Photoshop is digital art,

photography is analogue

Where are you from? 1982?

grogi

CabanSail wrote: »

The RAW file is data from the sensor. Unfortunately there is some adjustment in most cameras and it not linear but has some compression in the shadows and highlights added (would much prefer the file to be linear) there can also be some data compression too, normally lossless, to make the files a bit smaller.

Still a RAW File is essentially a data dump from the sensor. It is from this data set that a photograph can be produced. There is a small jpeg image embedded in the file for display purposes but it is not the "original" but can be used for reference. Then the RAW converter will interpret the data with the default settings and show that as an image.

Ok - I can agree that a RAW file is an 'original'. But it is not a picture...

For it to become a picture processing needs to be applied. And even with the 'default' processing settings results vary - I think it was RAW in Lightroom 3 crashed the one from LR2...



Which of those two is closer to the 'original'?

magicbastarder

grogi wrote: »

Ok - I can agree that a RAW file is an 'original'. But it is not a picture...

are we getting existential?

grogi

magicbastarder wrote: »

are we getting existential?

A little bit.

I made my case that there is no point in talking about original in digital photography. There might be 'too much processing', but there never is 'no processing'.

magicbastarder

i should point out that i was getting at the 'you need to process a RAW file' argument - there's absolutely nothing wrong with outputting it with the defaults, but yes, even the defaults are largely a set of metadata existing alongside the actual info from the sensor.

Tiriel

harr wrote: »

Currently getting into photography a bit more and have joined a local club, so every month we are given a subject to shoot..at end of month we are critiqued on our photos...last few months I have been marked down for not using photoshop ...me personally don't like photos that are photoshopped to death...
A lady in our group uses it so much her photos end up looking like a painting...
So how much photoshop is to much?
Should I start using it more,at the moment I only use to make small adjustments with the light...

I would say yes, that once you have a good understanding of how your camera works and you are able to get most things right 'in camera', it is a positive step to getting a better understanding of what enhancements are possible using software. Be it Photoshop, LightRoom etc.

The extent to which you want to enhance your photograph is entirely up to you and I can promise you, that as you learn and advance your knowledge of photography but also of the software you use, your interpretation of what enhancements are suitable will vary image by image.

I second what has been posted above, start out with basic adjustments. Youtube tutorials are a great place to do this, at your own pace. Learn how to do a good black and white conversion. Learn how to crop correctly to output for printing. Learn how to make a composite image using parts from others, texture layers, etc. if that is something that you are interested in. It's completely up to you but essentially, start with the basics to make your images the best that they can be in your own eyes.

Ursus Horribilis

What do they say to the lady in your class who's over-processing her photos? Personally I dislike that sort of over-processing if it's the only trick in a person's armoury and they do it to all of their photos. Photos have been processed to a certain extent since the beginning of time really. Even the dodge and burn tools in many photo editing programs have their roots in old-skool darkrooms. When I take photos I try to get them as right as possible on the spot but sometimes they need more help. A little something to make them pop or whatever. If you're only tweaking the lighting levels on your photos, is there a chance your photos are coming out a bit flat?

It's not a good example but I liken photo editing to the work of a foley artist on a film. If you don't notice their work, they're doing a good job.

harr

Ursus Horribilis wrote: »

What do they say to the lady in your class who's over-processing her photos? Personally I dislike that sort of over-processing if it's the only trick in a person's armoury and they do it to all of their photos. Photos have been processed to a certain extent since the beginning of time really. Even the dodge and burn tools in many photo editing programs have their roots in old-skool darkrooms. When I take photos I try to get them as right as possible on the spot but sometimes they need more help. A little something to make them pop or whatever. If you're only tweaking the lighting levels on your photos, is there a chance your photos are coming out a bit flat?

It's not a good example but I liken photo editing to the work of a foley artist on a film. If you don't notice their work, they're doing a good job.

They don't say a terrible lot but do give her a lot of praise on her work ..I don't mind a bit of touch up to lighting or tweaking other areas..
Her last photo was a good shot ...landscape over a lake would have looked lovely with a lot less done to it..the sky was a shade of purple very unnatural looking and the water a blue you just wouldn't see in Ireland and in fact she had shadows going in different directions like if the sun was in two different places...
Anyway I am only starting the learning curve and have a lot to learn ... thanks to everyone for the suggestions on how to improve my processing.

Ursus Horribilis

There's a guy from my local area who shares a lot of his photos on social media. I think he has a good eye and takes really good photos. Then he ruins it all by over-processing them. Think of the most overcooked HDR photos you've seen and you'll have an idea what he does. Yet people seem to go mad for his work.

CabanSail

Ursus Horribilis wrote: »

There's a guy from my local area who shares a lot of his photos on social media. I think he has a good eye and takes really good photos. Then he ruins it all by over-processing them. Think of the most overcooked HDR photos you've seen and you'll have an idea what he does. Yet people seem to go mad for his work.

Have seen that all too often. What to me is an affront to my eyes others think is wonderful. It's a bit like a kitten with some shiny things. When you strip away the glitz there is nothing much there in the base image.

Cannot recall the name but we had a poster here who used to do a lot of HDR landscapes. To be fair some of them were quite good but to mee seemed overprocessed. He had a "Road to Damascus" moment and realised that it was the process that was becoming the main thing and he walked away from HDR. He went back to many of his images ans selected one exposure to process and re-present. The resulting work was far more subtle and worked a lot better than the earlier versions.

I recall a very talented guitarist I saw who had written on one of his guitars "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" which is also good advice for post production of photographs.

Adrian.Sadlier

Quote from Wikipedia

'The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots phÅtos, genitive of phÅs, "light" and graphé "representation by means of lines" or "drawing",together meaning "drawing with light".' (sorry the fonts did't match there).

IMHO its an art form. So whatever tools the "author" uses, digital or analogue, is valid. As with all art forms, not everybody will like, agree with or value an individual authors work. As it should be - art is subjective. If we all produced the same stlye of images how boring would that be?

Again, IMHO the OP's question refers to some of the tools that are available and the efficacy of them. With the limited experience I have I would say that depends on what you want to achieve as an end result (limited by budget, ability, time etc.).

Personally I use LR as my first step in processing all "captured" images (whether analogue "scanned" images or digitally captured; I haven't the time or the skill for "wet printing" yet). It allows me to edit tones, contrast, clarity, saturation, crop, brightness etc.).

If I need to alter the "detail" of the image (remove rubbish from any image I didn't notice when I pressed the shutter; remove an object that jars with my intent for the image etc.) I will use PS. I use the CC version of both which I find personally affordable - others will differ.

But the important thing to remember, again IMHO, is that we are trying to present our interpretation of the physical reality that we tried to capture - what I "see" when I press the shutter is not the same as what you see. If I am lucky, I get an end result that is close to what I "saw" in my minds eye when I decided to capture the image (though rarely). Even what we see as individuals differs - remember what we see is "interpreted" by our brains. And no two people are the same (never mind our changing capabilities as we age).

So perhaps we could focus on the techniques and technologies that allow us to realise our "vision" rather than making subjective judgements on the validity of that vision.

I think that would be a more helpful approach. Remember, what you like may not be the same as what someone else likes.

Our "reality" is entirely subjective.

(and now I hide in the bunker, awaiting the fallout)