[Not a Number]

Looks perfect - for a postcard.

[johnhilvert]

One person’s processing that makes their image “pop” is another person’s “over-cooked”.

The opacity slider is your friend.

[Paul the Sunman]

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?

[house]

Today there are often multiple trends going on at the same time. High saturation is often linked to kitsch and postcard style photography and seen vulgar or commercial to those with "sophisticated" taste. In the proper art world taste is used differently so high saturation is a tool amongst others.

I tend to pull my saturation sliders to the left so I'm not a fan of the deer to the right. But I also recognise that my education and connection to pretentious people has influenced me. I also know that the sophisticated look in postprocessing often become as pastiche as the postcard.

[ffking]

This is my take on it:

The real world is multi-sensory and 3-D - photographs are visual only and 2-D. They do not, in themselves give a true impression of the scene or subject, let alone what it was like to be there. To me, post processing that emphasises what the photographer wanted to say when he composed the image totally legitimate. I the scene felt vivid to him/her, then it's fine by me if he/she ups the vividness of the rather flat RAW image (which in itself is not a true representation of reality, no more than the jpeg is). Actually, the real world is sometimes more vivid than we give it credit for, and we are afraid of where standard processing of the RAW takes us, and rein it back a bit - that's not realistic either.

Black and white is not realistic either, but people never complain about that. They do sometimes complain about dark contrasty B&W, but again, if that emphasises what the photographer wants to say about the subject, that's fine by me.

What I try never to do, and don't personally like, is the use of saturation or contrast merely to draw attention to an image - it must have more creative integrity than that to satisfy.

But visual literacy is like word literacy - it takes learning, and some will always make more effort than others to learn it, and some will always prefer Dan Brown to Dostoevsky.

[clackers]

What do you consider ideal for a picture? Is my taste for the natural unusual, out of fashion, or does it mark me as an amateur?

High contrast, 3D and super saturated is the current fashion, Barbara, check this search:

beautiful landscapes of the world - Bing images

If you want to progress in doing an editorial style, perhaps working in that field for a resort, tourism office or magazine, forget snobbishness, you need to be adept with it, it's what clients and the general community want. Peter Eastway is one of my favourite Australian landscapers with that 'look', as is Lauren Bath.

But your own personal style can be very different, very muted, very understated. Another of my favourite landscapers is Michael Kenna, who shoots black and white and very diffused, with extremely long exposures, and sometimes very flat/2D with lots of negative space.

[house]

High contrast, 3D and super saturated is the current fashion, Barbara, check this search:

beautiful landscapes of the world - Bing images

If you want to progress in doing an editorial style, perhaps working in that field for a resort, tourism office or magazine, forget snobbishness, you need to be adept with it, it's what clients and the general community want.

It depends on your ambition. Someone with a portfolio full of unabashed crowdpleasers won't sell to the very high end magazines. But as you say some can keep two identities going one developing their art and one their craft.

I'm not a pro, and wouldn't become one if it was offered but have some connections to the art world as well as publishing. So that's where my comments are coming from.

[clackers]

It depends on your ambition. Someone with a portfolio full of unabashed crowdpleasers won't sell to the very high end magazines. But as you say some can keep two identities going one developing their art and one their craft.

.

Correct, you'd need both. That's part of the gig.

You can be a commercial photographer at one end or a 'starving artist' doing stuff that only pleases you at the other.

Having mastery of both styles fixes that dilemma, no?

If not, as Ming Thein says, most photographers, like most rock musicians, are broke.

His street pictures don't pay his bills, it's the product photography - watches etc.

[Na Horuk]

I also like ease in processing, and this brought me to this question. I don't like obvious processing, and yet judging by the monthly photo contests most folks here do. Colors are beautiful but unnatural to my eyes. Rather than pick on anyone here, I'll show you an ad that sums it up for me.

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

[micromacro]

Photography is not different than other visual arts. On the one side the slider goes from "cheesy" style aka oversaturated, terrible HDRs, overblurred etc. to high end, fine art. And there are lots of in between.
But yes, I don't think that the image from the camera is natural. It's just raw

[reeftool]

It reminds me of a scene I took once that was so dramatic I posted it almost "as is." I was chastised by a forum user for over processing to which I replied "pfffft" .My guess is the first image is straight from the raw and seriously under processed, yes folks, raw must be pressed and what comes off the camera is not"natural."

The second image is probably bit over processed. That being said, what was the light like, what would those autumn reds look like in sunrise or sunset? It's possible they were even more dramatic. Our usual rule of thumb is it's definitely over processed if you've lost subject detail through saturation or contrast. If it was a fall sunset the colors on the second may be more accurate than the colors in the first, but in any case the legs are black blobs and seriously under-exposed suggesting the contrast may have been bumped to much, although the original doesn't look any better.

enough for the technical stuff. Lets do some art.
What I worry about is not technical accuracy. I took the picture because the scene slapped me upside the head, and said "take this picture knucklehead", I want my image to have the impact of the original scene. I want it to slap the viewer upside the head and say "look at this picture knucklehead," You don't do that with flat images, So are you going for technical accuracy or emotional integrity. A lot of the time you can't have both. If it's the shocking red autumn leaves that caught your attention, there should be shocking red leaves that catch your attention in our image.

Way to often, I see these kinds of threads as excuses for not doing enough. If you made a statement taking the photo, your post processing should augment that process by putting an exclamation mark on it. I personally think way to many people think the way an image comes off the camera is in some way "natural". I see it as unfinished. When I look at a photo I know what image it left in my gray matter. I'm going to post process until it looks like that. But that's looking for something so far out it captures the spirit of the original, of which it will always be a weak approximate, no matter hw much you process it.

There have been times when I said " You really need to have been there, but it wasn't a flat boring scene, and it should't be a flat boring image."

Norm, you pretty much covered my thoughts on the issue. I see a lot of awesome fall scenery here in the Adirondacks and most of my Raw photos never really capture the light and color of the moment. There are usually a couple days every year when the foliage is at it's peak and the light is just right that it all looks completely unreal. You have to be there.

When we go through our Raw photos a day later in PP, we rarely see the same scene in the photo that made us slam on the brakes, pull over, and fire off a bunch of shots. We then try to recreate that emotional moment in PP. I wasn't there so I can't really criticize. All photos are a work of art because the lens and sensor (or film) don't see the world the same way we do. Our eyes don't have bokeh and those of us who do, wear glasses to correct it. When we pick up the camera and focus, we are already editing to emphasize the part of the scene we choose to. If you shoot JPEG's, the camera is already editing the light and exposure for what it thinks is right. Another time of year is late spring, when the new green leaves almost seem to glow fluorescent green in certain light conditions. You just have to be there and I have posted shots that people think are over saturated when in reality, I turned the saturation down in PP.

[baro-nite]

Is a painting "over-processed" and to be dismissed because it is "not natural"? Why should photography be held to a different standard.

Because photography is fundamentally different from painting. It's not just a different medium expressing the same basic thing. Photography has a unique power of verisimilitude, based simply on the way the medium works and the viewer's recognition of a photograph as a photograph. What matters (for artistic photography) is not that an image faithfully represents the subject or scene, but that it expresses a sense of reality, of truth. When the processing is so heavy that an ordinary viewer becomes aware of it, that power is greatly diminished.

And without that power of verisimilitude, photography is simply painting for the untalented.

[CarlJF]

As an amateur, the only important thing is that the processing pleases you, no matter if others think it's under or overprocessed. If you're a pro, the only thing that matter is that the processing pleases the client, no matter what you really think of it.

[35mmfilmfan]

If you want raw, you eat salad. If you want Beef Stew, you process it. One man's meat, etc.

[awscreo]

Photography to me is "painting with light", you can do whatever you want with it. I'm much more critical of technique used in processing or photographing (looking for obvious blends/cloning/manipulation, blur where it should be sharp, etc) than color and overall look when viewing images on my usual platforms. I don't think one approach is better than any other, I believe it's rather personal, and one pays rather high price of being part of it (price of gear, time spent learning, processing images, going out and scouting locations, paying for photo trips etc etc). Take advice, but if it goes against what you truly feel and what to show in images - do your thing)

One will end up with their own preferences in style/composition in the end, just like with any art form.