[Ratmagiclady]

I'm afraid it's long past time to get used to the fact that digital images can be manipulated.

Agreed. If you're going to be a purist, do your 'purity.' As someone with a lot of 'obsoleted' skills that once meant most people couldn't get a technically-good shot, (I used to pride myself on how fast I could reload a film camera. Yay. What am I gonna do with that, use small SD cards? ) ...well, there's only so much crying about it to be done.

One of the reasons I'm glad I got to scoop up a K20d is, 'Well, this fellow can generally get the shot whenever I could with film, about as well as I could at a given ISO...' OK.
Most of my friends with cell phone cams can still post things faster than I can.

(Working on that, but hey. Analog person.)

I do intend to have some fun with this new tech, but also, I'm like, "I'm never going to apologize for 'acting my age.'"

People seem to obsess a lot about noise and CA and PF and such... That's actually nothing new. I just try and 'expose properly' and the noise is kind enough, generally. Once upon a time, there was much chatter and advertising and trade-talk about 'fine grain' in films, ...even then I was like, 'The grain is fine. As long as it's *pretty* grain.'

It's all changing. Kind of always has been. By some criteria, I could have blown away Matthew Brady with a Canonet. (It's a favorite thing to walk around antique photo shows and imagine meeting the photog and showing them my F-1N or whatever, just photographer to photographer. 'Hey, check this out.' )

Used to be, you couldn't get a 'real' photograph of anybody appearing to move without posing and clamping them down.

It's all right, really. Stuff changes. If ou want to keep it simple, keep it simple.

[Ira]

I've been on a Mac working with PS since the first Apple came out--and I can't even tell you what version of PS I was using. (Mid 80s.)

So we're going on 30 years, and although I can hold my own against newbies and mid-level users, I still stink at it.

As said eloquently above by many, PS is just a tool. And as shown by the thousands upon thousands of photos posted here where PS had nothing to do with it all, it isn't even a NECESSARY tool to create great art.

In fact, usually a hindrance--which is why I stink as a photographer:

Focusing on the wrong aspect of it.

[saien]

Apparently the content aware filter isn't good enough. Here's an example (a bit nsfw) http://i.imgur.com/QmeqG.png

Yes I think that one needs a bit more work..

[RioRico]

Ah, we've had this chat before. All photography is manipulation, unless you or a robot just randomly point a lens around and snap. Reality is manipulated by being framed; the framed subject is manipulated by choice of lens, film or sensor settings, filters, exposure; the captured image is manipulated by choices of rendering and presentation. Working image-makers do whatever it takes to produce a useful and usable image, and have ever since the invention of the camera obscura some centuries ago. Life is impure, yet we endure.

Some are honest about their manipulation. I acknowledge that the images I capture are mere grist for the mill, raw material to feed into the shooping machine. Often I try for realistic representations; often I don't, and IT DON'T WORRY ME! I don't enter photo-purity competitions. Producing photos used to be a job, now it's for my own obtuse pleasure, and IT DON'T WORRY ME! I'm generally too lazy to stage shots, but I'm not afraid to, no more than were/are esteemed photogs of the past and present who position subjects where they wish. Yeah, that's manipulation too. Shove a lens into someone's face, provoke them to react, snap their visage -- you've manipulated them into producing an expression. Shame, shame...

OK, it's time to take more shots of Godzilla attacking the gray aliens.

[johnmflores]

AKA, the Observer Effect and is related to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

The mere act of observing something changes it.

[grey goat]

It's all changing. Kind of always has been. By some criteria, I could have blown away Matthew Brady with a Canonet.

This made me laugh, Ratmagiclady!

Used to be, you couldn't get a 'real' photograph of anybody appearing to move without posing and clamping them down.

It's all right, really. Stuff changes. If ou want to keep it simple, keep it simple.

Yep.

The thing lots of folks forget when it comes to photo-manipulation is that it's been done forever. Aside from the normal darkroom work, think of all the portrait and glamor photos that were airbrushed long before Adobe even existed. And it wasn't confined to that genre: propaganda, advertising . . . it happened in all sorts of genres.

I never got into any of that, but I did spend hours at a time in my darkroom. Probably will again, too.

But it's like Ratmagiclady says: If you want to keep it simple, keep it simple. Photo-manipulation isn't a requirement; it's just a means to an end for some folks.

[unixrevolution]

This made me laugh, Ratmagiclady!

Yep.

The thing lots of folks forget when it comes to photo-manipulation is that it's been done forever. Aside from the normal darkroom work, think of all the portrait and glamor photos that were airbrushed long before Adobe even existed. And it wasn't confined to that genre: propaganda, advertising . . . it happened in all sorts of genres.

I never got into any of that, but I did spend hours at a time in my darkroom. Probably will again, too.

But it's like Ratmagiclady says: If you want to keep it simple, keep it simple. Photo-manipulation isn't a requirement; it's just a means to an end for some folks.

Picture manipulation existed before photography, when painters would make portraits especially flattering for their clientele.

I like to keep as much of my work in the camera as possible. I have a philosophy that at some point, the manipulated photo is more of a drawing than a photo. Still, PP can be quite invaluable to get what you originally wanted when you fired the shutter.

[Ratmagiclady]

This made me laugh, Ratmagiclady!

Heehee. Also just goes to show, be careful of shooting in any medium in which your negs might make good greenhouse windows.

It's like... Yay. Unrecoverable image data, Victorian style.

[RioRico]

Heehee. Also just goes to show, be careful of shooting in any medium in which your negs might make good greenhouse windows.

You mean like, recycling glass photographic plates into accent windows? Hey, someone could make a fortune producing faked photo-plates to sell to hipsters! Yeah, mass-produce some batches, negative copies of Matthew Brady war-of-southern-secession photos, marketed to Federalist Civil War re-enactors or their Confederate treason-loving counterparts. Or for ancient pervs, produce negs of Victorian pr0n and classy nudes and the like. Instead of "Hey baby, wanna come up and see my etchings?" it's "Hey, you should see this wall-full of London glass I have in my flat!"

It's like... Yay. Unrecoverable image data, Victorian style.

Only if you've messed with the plates.

[RioRico]

Picture manipulation existed before photography, when painters would make portraits especially flattering for their clientele.

All those staged grand Academy-style paintings of historical and biblical scenes were the pre-modern counterparts of heavily-shooped assemblages. And early photographers building photo-montages merely copied their brush-wielding predecessors to construct scenes of overlaid images. Now we have Worth1000 and other purveyors of heavily-built photography. But even before Xerox art, photo-collage artists of Dada and Modernism performed whatever manipulations they deemed necessary to make their pungent, often political points.

Leaf through the Focal Press ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY and you'll find entries for some 'photographers' who never even touched a camera. Some of the most prominent names of both the 19th and 20th centuries are those who directed the work of photographers without messing with the gear themselves. Similarly, some of the great Classical and Renaissance 'painters' were more like cinema producers, running studios where grunts did the work and the masters signed their names. Modern counterpart: Jeff Koons. So what's more important: the artistic vision, or the hand that snaps the shutter?

[jct us101]

While I was just editing some photos from a baseball game before coming to Pentaxforums, I realized something. All of the photos that I had taken only looked the way that I had seen them then (not even close to how they really looked, but the best photographic representation from there) but the ones that I didn't edit looked nothing like I remember it.

So is it really that bad to edit your photos? I mean our cameras aren't really good enough to know exactly how we saw something, and they can't edit a photo to make it look that way.

[RioRico]

While I was just editing some photos from a baseball game before coming to Pentaxforums, I realized something. All of the photos that I had taken only looked the way that I had seen them then (not even close to how they really looked, but the best photographic representation from there) but the ones that I didn't edit looked nothing like I remember it.

So is it really that bad to edit your photos? I mean our cameras aren't really good enough to know exactly how we saw something, and they can't edit a photo to make it look that way.

Cameras see what's there. Our brains see what we want to be there, what we expect to be there, whether it's actually there or not. And our brains don't see what we don't want, don't expect, what we don't know. Perception is more complex than recording. Perception involves pattern-recognition, memory, expectation, emotion, as well as just the sensory inputs. We receive those inputs, process them, use them to synthesize perceptions and more memories. We are complex beings.

I used to diddle with AI, artificial intelligence. One standard there is the Turing Test -- you have a remote conversation with something, human or machine. If it's a machine and you can't TELL that it's a machine, then in passes the test. An early contender was the ELIZA program, which emulates a non-directive (Rogerian) psychoanalyst. You say (write) something to ELIZA; ELIZA turns what you've said into a question and returns it to you. ELIZA didn't pass the Turing Test -- no crazy enough.

So was speculation in the AI world: for a really human-like AI, must it be insane, like humans? Must it be unpredictable and moody and vicious and obsessed and paranoid and neurotic etc, like humans? Must it hallucinate?

I think that's the key to human vision and perception. We hallucinate; the camera doesn't. The camera is too honest. It's like Picasso said: Computers are useless, they only give you answers. Photorealism is honesty, maybe too much honesty. Photomanipulation is hallucination, seeing what isn't there. That's human. Honest photography isn't, it's more robotic. I could program the camera robot like so: enable trap-focus and continuous shooting, put on tripod, aim at bird feeder, latch the wired remote. The robot could take numerous perfect pictures of birds at the feeder, beautiful shots. That's nice. Nice robot. Do it again.

And that's why I'm not a purist.

[rparmar]

Further to RioRico...

It is sometimes mistakenly thought that a camera is only a tool and a photograph only a representation. But nothing could be further from the truth of our lives in hyper-simulation. A camera is a tool only as a first, very crude, approximation. The camera shapes us as we it. And keep in mind McLuhan and his much misunderstood phrase "the medium is the message".

Our behaviour as an individual changes when we are in front of a camera for a picture. Most of that is learned behaviour; we know what we are supposed to do, the poses we are supposed to throw, the attitudes we are supposed to convey. Likewise, when behind a camera we start looking at the world in a different way, in terms of "composition" on a two-dimensional plane, stuck within a frame, at such and such a ratio of dimensions, and so on.

Black and white requires even more exercise of the imagination, an even stronger aesthetic force of will, to wrest from the world its colour and render it in simple tonality. That is why many prefer black and white. It is not so much that it gives us a truer picture, as some (out of naivete?) claim. For there are in fact different radiation spectra we interpret as colour out there in the world! Rather, rendering the world in monochrome requires that we place a greater constraint on the world. And constraints are often integral to what we take for art.

There are cultures in the world (rapidly disappearing) who cannot read a photograph. Hold a photo of a man up beside the man and show them to his friend. The friend will not be able to see the man in the photo, will not be able to read it as a representation. And this is true of all of us at an early age. When growing we must learn to decipher the photograph. It is not a "natural" ability, not at all.

All photography is fake. All photography is photo-manipulation. There is no point whatsoever in drawing a line between true and false photography.

And in all this we are still only in the first order of simulacra; there are two more!

[RioRico]

And back at rparmar....

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

We expend copious time and resources wandering the realm of reality, intent upon capturing the image. But the other domain of creative image work is in editing, manipulating, reconstructing — post-production, getting it right. These after-work technologies, techniques, approaches, have long been in the purview of motion picture industries. It's studio work.

Renaissance artists had their production-line studios, structured in much the same way as modern cinema studios, with in-house and contract specialists, the work directed in its entirety by an individual or collective auteur, but the labor performed by crews of grunts, er craftspersons. Is it likely that serious still photography will go in the same direction, following the lead the the Warhol and Coombs art factories?

Or, since filmic auteurs with camcorders and computers and digital editing software can now construct serious productions in a backyard and a laptop, is it likely that the current cinema studio system will DEVOLVE, with serious work emanating from creative individuals or small teams with many cheap tools?

Major music labels once had studio production systems with in-house orchestras, arrangers, music directors, and many techincal and artistic specialists. And now we have talented individuals and small groups turning out and marketing their own hits,.without such studio-system backup, except maybe to handle the advertising. Again, will filmic production go the same way? And what are the implications for still photography?

For that, we have to think about whether a viable market for stills centers around glossy image journals; or glossy image books of maybe the coffee-table sort, or cute calendars, or classy pr0n, or up-to-the-minute broadcast / cable news with gripping frames grabbed by citizens on the scene with their cellphone cameras; or the vast numbers of publications (real and virtual) that consume and display tremendous amounts of imagery.

And/or pictures that go straight to Web, that go into private or public online galleries; or that illuminate news and feature pages, evocative and illustrative and (self-)promotional pages, crank pages and exploitative pages, maybe ephemeral — the whole gamut.

So, except for pictures of news value or personal value, WHO CARES what an image is or looks like? Should the straight photographer be reduced to setting up pictures of funny animals and people in hopes of scoring placement on a WHAT'S ODD NEWS page on a media website? Should the experimental photographer try a mix of art and porn and abstraction, with vivid titles to gain the attention of fast-surfing web-browsers?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the value of silence?

[Tuner571]

Cameras see what's there. Our brains see what we want to be there, what we expect to be there, whether it's actually there or not. And our brains don't see what we don't want, don't expect, what we don't know. Perception is more complex than recording. Perception involves pattern-recognition, memory, expectation, emotion, as well as just the sensory inputs. We receive those inputs, process them, use them to synthesize perceptions and more memories. We are complex beings.

I used to diddle with AI, artificial intelligence. One standard there is the Turing Test -- you have a remote conversation with something, human or machine. If it's a machine and you can't TELL that it's a machine, then in passes the test. An early contender was the ELIZA program, which emulates a non-directive (Rogerian) psychoanalyst. You say (write) something to ELIZA; ELIZA turns what you've said into a question and returns it to you. ELIZA didn't pass the Turing Test -- no crazy enough.

So was speculation in the AI world: for a really human-like AI, must it be insane, like humans? Must it be unpredictable and moody and vicious and obsessed and paranoid and neurotic etc, like humans? Must it hallucinate?

I think that's the key to human vision and perception. We hallucinate; the camera doesn't. The camera is too honest. It's like Picasso said: Computers are useless, they only give you answers. Photorealism is honesty, maybe too much honesty. Photomanipulation is hallucination, seeing what isn't there. That's human. Honest photography isn't, it's more robotic. I could program the camera robot like so: enable trap-focus and continuous shooting, put on tripod, aim at bird feeder, latch the wired remote. The robot could take numerous perfect pictures of birds at the feeder, beautiful shots. That's nice. Nice robot. Do it again.

And that's why I'm not a purist.

You make an interesting point Riorico, so many photographers blame their equipment when the photo does not some out as the image they have in their head. They then go through the trouble of changing systems and spending thousands of dollars on another setup that will also not deliver the image the photographer wanted.

You mention that humans hallucinate and the camera does not and I think that is a valid point. If the camera takes a photo of the scene that is really there what was the image that the photographer was seeing. Could it be a figment of our imagination or are we being creative; my guess is that the image that photographer wanted to see is an image that he has seen before.

There have been times when I went out to take photos and saw a scene that looked similar to a photograph that someone else took that was very stunning. However, when I took the photo the photograph showing on the screen does not even come close to the image I had in my mind, therefore making it a hallucination.

I also think that the hallucinations in our head can help us become better photographs as well. Since we have the image in out head the human ambition takes over and we try our best to match the photo we have in our head. Whether it be through photo manipulation or just some tweaking of the camera we as humans can change our ways to better serve our purpose and help us take better photos. It may not be the best way, but our ability to solve problems is something that allows us to be better then computers and the dominant species on this planet.