[ccc_]

I've enjoyed this one...

in my experience most "regular" people are going to choose the right (hand) image as their preference
the one that's left (hand) is going to tickle most traditionalist photographers' fancy

if processing for you....do what you like
if processing for someoneelse...do what they like
it will seldom be the same thing

[pentaxfall]

Post processing is a complex subject. For example sensor output needs sharpening, but most of the images that we see on screen tend be lot more sharper than the real object that we see using naked eye :-)

[Barbara Fu]

[/COLOR]

Post processing is a complex subject. For example sensor output needs sharpening, but most of the images that we see on screen tend be lot more sharper than the real object that we see using naked eye :-)

II wish you were wrong. I got LASEK and while I'm super happy with it, sometimes I get annoyed because items in the distance are not as sharp as they are in photos.

---------- Post added 12-23-17 at 05:25 PM ----------

(Hopefully this is not posted twice)

Is a painting "over-processed" and to be dismissed because it is "not natural"? Why should photography be held to a different standard. Let us embrace the full gamut. If it works, it works. The mood is far more important than adherence to "naturalness".

The Impressionists were slammed by the establishment at the time (in fact, "impressionist" was originally a pejorative term coined by a critic). Who do you think won that battle?

I genuinely appreciate the difference in perspective, but I need to defend my approach here.

I think photography should be held to a different standard because it is photography. When I point a camera at something I capture a moment of something that is really happening Take this shot, for example. (Sony HDR, headmounted, because I would never subject my Optio to these conditions)



That's the unprocessed shot. (The processed one, cropped and untilted, is not at my fingertips at the moment, so I'll do a quickie one now.)



This effect IMHO would be quite easy to do in a painting. The result would be tidier even, the water with clearer, more photogenic (forgive the expression) outlines, the framing of the face more perfect. A digital painting of this scene would be perfect, and to me that would be wrong. This kid is real and really having the time of his life. The water actually formed that shape. The guy with the hose is just there, not reacting to the kid. The clown is shooting at someone else. It's messy, and that's what I like about it.

As I've said in another thread, when viewing photos I like to imagine that if I were standing in that place at that time that I would see what the photo shows. Too much processing breaks that illusion for me, makes me feel that I'm looking at a digital cartoon rather than a photo.

---------- Post added 12-23-17 at 05:33 PM ----------

PP enhances the data already captured. Remember that the sensor does not capture "true" reality. It merely records some light and then a computer turns it into pixels and into what we perceive as a photograph. Doing heavy PP brings things out that the human perceived, but camera did not. For example, clouds. We see them very clearly and we enjoy them. But in raw photo data they look grey, without contrasts or details or shapes. So you can PP that to make the clouds in the photo look more like the scene you witnessed (in your human subjectivity)

The other parts to PP are fashion and market trends. One websites with thousands of photos, how can you make yours stand out? Well, the human mind will notice heavy colours more than muted colours. So the muted, low contrast photo will simply not get as many clicks as a saturated over the top photo.


Leaves in autumn

I took this photo with the K-r. Not a super sharp camera. The light in that forest was not strong and I did not bring my own lights with me (would that be "cheating", too?). But the leaves did stand out noticeably. I did heavy PP on this image in Lightroom and Nik Effects. I used PP to make them full of detail and to make them stand out in the photo as they did to me when I was walking there. I did not paint anything, did not add droplets digitally. Only "enhanced" the data that was recorded in the raw (saturation, sharpness, contrasts). Is what you see on your monitor objectively the same thing you would see if you went to that forest? Probably not. But you wouldn't see what an unprocessed camera raw recorded, either

Edit: Attached is the raw with no PP, only the default colour interpretation (which itself is subjective and will be different from camera to camera, from software to software). I don't remember the leaves looking so "brown", to me they were shining in that forest. I chose this photo as example because I know I went a little hard on the PP, especially because it makes the bokeh look hard; and because the raw seems really dull, unimpressive, almost depressing

Thanks for the raw shot, really puts it in perspective.

I agree the raw shot needed some work,but in my personal taste I think you overshot the PP. Mind you, I'm looking at it on a frankly cheap, contrasty laptop monitor. If I put it up on the Chromecast I might feel differently.

As I posted a few minutes ago, for me it's about the illusion that I'm standing there looking at those leaves and they're pretty enough to shoot. I appreciate that you didn't digitally add water, I really do. Unless you were quite subtle with them, though, I'm glad you didn't bring a light source.

[clickclick]

Is it just me, or is the eye drawn down to the bushes in the background on the processed image? I feel like I look at the buck's face in the first image, but I feel like my vision is pulled towards the too bold colors on the background bushes.

I find this whole discussion interesting. I started shooting B&W in the mid 70's, and soon started my own dark room work, and expanded that into doing color slides and ultimately color printing of slides using the Cibachrome system - after a long hiatus, I "returned" to photography and entered the digital world with the purchase of my K3II in 2016. Due to my roots, I feel like my final result, always, was highly dependent on what I could do in the camera, and as a result, I still lean towards what I get out of the camera. I dabble in post processing, but for the most part find myself not changing things much from the captured shot. That includes cropping. At times, I think I'm missing something by not doing more post, and go back and try different things just to be sure. I feel the software learning curve can be steep in some of these programs, so I'm trying to figure out how much is taste versus not knowing what can be done. For the time being, I find the more useful post tools things like noise removal, especially as I do more high ISO work with the low light capabilities cameras now have. it's stuff like this, tweaking a low light photo, where I can really see post being a needed tool that lets the photographer achieve things otherwise not possible, and that does include stuff like capturing the essence of a street carnival at night, etc., that would otherwise be lost without some help in post.

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Last edited by clickclick; 12-23-2017 at 06:42 PM.

[35mmfilmfan]

The ad does actually say 'Dramatic results' - not 'Accurate results'. An artist, when rebuked by a visitor 'I have never seen a sunset that colour !' replied, 'Ah! But Madam, don't you wish that you could ?'. (I believe it was Whistler, but I cannot locate the quote at present - if anyone can enlighten me, I shall be grateful). The results I achieve are usually solely to please myself - for public display, I tend to tone them down somewhat, not having the above artist's confidence.

[ccc_]

The ad does actually say 'Dramatic results' - not 'Accurate results'. An artist, when rebuked by a visitor 'I have never seen a sunset that colour !' replied, 'Ah! But Madam, don't you wish that you could ?'. (I believe it was Whistler, but I cannot locate the quote at present - if anyone can enlighten me, I shall be grateful). The results I achieve are usually solely to please myself - for public display, I tend to tone them down somewhat, not having the above artist's confidence.

I had a teacher in the distant reach of time who said an artist renders what they see not what everyone else sees
then she went on to say that sometimes an artist just makes things up

i'll skip what she thought of photography...it would just make you put your camera down

[normhead]

the one that's left (hand) is going to tickle most traditionalist photographers' fancy

You mean traditionalists who are in complete denial about how much time we used to spend in the darkroom dodging, burning, adjusting contrast, filtering to adjust colour balance and saturation, or who didn't realize the local colour lab did the colour balance and contrast automatically? It must be that kind of traditionalist, because most traditionalists understood you needed as much time in the dark room as you did in the studio. But I guess there might have been a few who were ignorant of that process. Not Adams or Avedon or anyone I knew, but I guess it is theoretically possible there were a few. But they would have been neanderthals, not photographers. For some reason you can be a "photographer" in the old days without a darkroom and knowing what to do in it.

So if by traditionalist you mean folks who dropped their film off at the one hour photo and accepted what they got back as "natural", then I'm with you. But I don't think you really want to be lumped in with the one hour photo crowd. They weren't necessarily called photographers. So the question would be "traditionalists" in what?" Laziness?

People should realize, the tradition of collecting auto-corrected auto-processed drug store processing was not used by any mainstream photographer. Most spent hours in post processing. Taking a negative of an image after post in a copy frame was a thing, so you didn't have to do the same post processing on every photo you sold. It was one of the first things taught.
personally, I had a group of excellent darkroom techs right around the corner from me and I relied on their expertise for work that I sold. Now I do it myself in digital. It was a sad day for me when they packed it in as digital took over.

Back in my neighbourhood in the 60s, in a two block area, there were three basement darkrooms for advanced amateurs. No post processing was never a thing.

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Last edited by normhead; 12-24-2017 at 07:42 AM.

[photoptimist]

You mean traditionalists who are in complete denial about how much time we used to spend in the darkroom dodging, burning, adjusting contrast, filtering to adjust colour balance and saturation, or who didn't realize the local colour lab did the colour balance and contrast automatically? It must be that kind of traditionalist, because most traditionalists understood you needed as much time in the dark room as you did in the studio. But I guess there might have been a few who were ignorant of that process. Not Adams or Avewdon or anyone I knew, but I guess it is theoretically possible there were a few. But they would have been neanderthals, not photographers. For some reason you can be a "photographer" in the old days without a darkroom and knowing what to do in it.

So if by traditionalist you mean folks who dropped their film off at the one hour photo and accepted what they got back as "natural", then I'm with you. But I don't think you really want to be lumped in with the one hour photo crowd. They weren't necessarily called photographers. So the question would be "traditionalists" in what?" Laziness?

People should realize, the tradition of collecting auto-corrected auto-processed drug store processing was not used by any mainstream photographer. Most spent hours in post processing. Taking a negative of an image after post in a copy frame was a thing, so you didn't have to do the same post processing on every photo you sold. It was one of the first things taught.

Traditionalist doesn't mean no post processing and it certainly does not mean accepting auto-processed snapshots from a quickie-lab. In fact it can take a lot of very careful post processing to correct for the limitations and aberrations of the lens, camera, and printing process to create an accurate "traditional" representation of the true scene.

And when we depart from photograph-as-objective-documentation-of-the-world to create some amalgam of the natural scene and artistic artifice, then we do get into the gray-area or colorful topic of how much post processing is too much post processing. The answer to that depends on the photographer's explicit or implicit statement about the veracity of image.

If you ask a photographer whether the scene really looked like that, you might get four types of answers:
1) "Sort of.. it's what the camera put out."
2) "Yes, the scene really actually looked exactly like this."
3) "Well, the scene looked that dramatic to me."
4) "No, the scene was not quite like that, but you'll like this image better than the natural scene."

To me, the original image pair illustrates answers #1 and #4, the traditionalist tries for #2, and the artist might shoot for #3 or #4. It's a spectrum and no answer is really the wrong answer. Under or over-processing is really a mismatch between what the viewer expects (on the 1 through 4 statement list) and what the photographer did.

[normhead]

I see absolutely no value in trying to exactly replicate a scene, unless it's a news photo or for an archival historical record. I know of a couple guys who have their own studio space and sell and give classes. They both post process in what I'd call "the Photoshop" stye and are very good at it. At the craft shows, I've never seen even one image for sale that could have been straight off the camera. People with no agenda and who just buy what they like have a completely different take on this.

This is some kind of weird half baked thing where those who can't make it look good try and make out there is something wrong with people who posses skills they don't.

I've seen very few over processed images since Bob Harris stopped posting. I see 100 images that need post processing for every one I see that is over-processed. Let's keep it in perspective. The general rule is, people need to be better at PP, let's not encourage folks to stay lazy by implying there might be some kind of historical value to their photos because they don't.

And my answer to the question "Is that what the scene looked like?" Is "no. The scene I viewed had a contrast range of approx. 20,000:1. This one has contrast values of maybe 100:1. There is nothing I can do to match the depth, the saturation, the contrast or the detail in the original. This is a 2D representation of a 3D scene and will it will never be like the original scene no matter what i do or don't do."

We shouldn't be encouraging the notion that there is such a thing as an image that looks the same as the original, or that there is value in making one if there was. Images are important only in their ability to elicit a human response. What was there is irrelevant.

ANd please don't do the historical archivist thing. Not one photographer in a million is a historical archivist, and there are many other technical fields, medical photography, folks who copy and cataloguer items for museums etc. and they are all pretty much 1 in a million and irrelevant to general discussion. After 60 years of photography, I have not taken one image I thought was part of some imagined "historical record". Casual photographers just don't do that kind of thing.

[mohb]

Where does B&w come into this debate? If B & W can be judged on the aesthetics of the image rather than any connection with reality why not treat all images the same.

[photoptimist]

Some people like fiction and some people like non-fiction and that's just as true in photography as in books. Different strokes for different folks.

And we agree that, as with books, the raw first draft of an image is almost certainly in need of editing. (And I agree there's a lot of rough-draft SOOC images in the world that need a some post processing.)

But some people get rightfully cranky over photos that are fiction presented as non-fiction. That issue affects more than just journalism and archival recording. Some percentage of the audience for landscape and nature photos seems to want a high-fidelity non-fiction version of the image rather than the version with saturation=100% and a composite-added full-moon. "Pop" may be popular in some circles but it is abhorrent to others.

(P.S. I see a lot of properly post-processed landscapes on PF, including yours. But the original poster's image pair and what sometimes shows up in craft fairs and tourist shops does have too many over-processed images.)

[pentaxfall]

I had a teacher in the distant reach of time who said an artist renders what they see not what everyone else sees
then she went on to say that sometimes an artist just makes things up

I agree with teacher's words. My other hobby is painting. In case of painting, I start from scratch(means blank canvas) but in case of photography i do not start from scratch. I am capturing what is already existing so it is better if the final picture stays close to original subject

[ccc_]

I've attached two images

they were done on request
neither one of them retain more than a quarter of the original shot and neither one of them retains the original "look"

they are composited and processed much farther than I would go for myself

they are definitely not SOOC

[Barbara Fu]

I've attached two images

they were done on request
neither one of them retain more than a quarter of the original shot and neither one of them retains the original "look"

they are composited and processed much farther than I would go for myself

they are definitely not SOOC

And they both look painterly to me, though the second one still looks pretty enough. The first one to my eyes looks garish. While I've seen sunsets with oranges that bright, something about the angles of the color hits me wrong. The blue underneath could almost be natural, almost, but not with that orange there. My brain wants to know where the sun is, and my eyes are getting five different answers.

The silhouette tree is a genuinely pretty shot, but with the tree so black I just can't buy the clouds lower left so bright. They look literally painted, with a brush, a Van Gogh, out of focus. I think the original shot with less correction would look lovely on my wall.

Again, looking at this on my contrasty laptop monitor. And "SOOC"?

[35mmfilmfan]

And "SOOC"?

AFAIK, it means 'Straight Out Of Camera' - i.e unprocessed.