On Tue, August 16, 2011 07:51, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > I think I am kind of in the middle where there is a time and a place for > everything. IF you are photographing in tricky conditions, post > processing can be a god send. Tricky light? Work in raw and photoshop > can help. Many techniques you could do in a wet darkroom, but the skill, > expense and time were so prohibitive that few ever did. How many of you > have actually retouched a black and white negative? I don't have the > talent with a paint brush to do that. Many photos are much improved with > a few clicks. It opens the door to many creative possibilities that would > largely go undone and many fine art works left in the imagination. > Still that doesn't give one an excuse for sloppy photography. Even though > it can be fixed later, that takes time. If moving 3 feet gets rid of a > problem before it exists, its quicker to move the feet than it is to move > the mouse, especially when you have hundreds of photos to review and > correct. Attention to exposure and the fundamentals of photography can > avoid a great deal of time later. I don't have the eyes, or the hands, or the binocular microscope, for negative retouching; I did spotting and retouching on B&W prints, though. I do come from the era where "doing your own printing" was a big deal; the only substitute for that was being rich enough to afford to hire your own printer, or at the very very minimum working with the same lab enough that you have a printer there who understands your requirements. I never made a lot of money from photography, so for me, it was always doing my own printing. To get the best possible print, you needed to do cropping (paper aspect ratio not matching negative aspect ratio), pick paper grade (assuming you're using your normal paper; maybe I should go back a step and "pick paper type"), set exposure. Most photos needed at least some local density correction (dodging and burning). You could do more of that with selective development (heating with fingers or breath to speed development locally, lifting out of the tray to allow local exhaustion). You could do a small amount of perspective correction with tilts in the enlarger (limited by depth of focus). I don't know anybody who used contrast masks in B&W darkroom printing, but one could even do that. Color, which I only did for a few years and never got especially good at in the darkroom, was worse; color balance, and the interaction of impure filters (before additive dichroic heads came along), and how long it took to get things to the point where you could judge them, really bogged down darkroom work. And you were much more likely to really need contrast masks, which I still never used. >From that background, people who decry "post-processing" strike me as not doing their work any favors! (I haven't heard anybody here really take that line. I do occasionally get a whiff of the idea that post-processing is all "fixing" things that should have been gotten right in-camera, and if you look at the list above, that's not true. I do agree with the people like you who argue it's generally easier to get something right in-camera than to fix it.) > The one time I do have a problem with excessive post processing is when > the photos are being used to tell a story, and the story you are telling > with them is deceptive or a bald face lie. Then I have a problem and the > clone tool can lie as quickly as a politician. So can the crop tool, > depending on what you are cropping out. Pure art photos can still tell a story, and those stories are made-up; I don't see this line as coming between "story" and other uses of photos, but as between art vs. recording / reporting photos. You can lie just by what direction you point the camera; definitely. What gets complicated is people like Ansel Adams. He was clearly making art, not strictly reporting; but he was making art towards people appreciating the fantastic scenery in our country. Obviously using B&W was a distortion of reality, and his treatments of contrast very frequently went well beyond nature. I haven't heard anybody report being disappointed that the reality wasn't as Adams pictured it, though. (Of course some people just don't like his artistic vision, which is fine.) One view would be that an aspect of his art was actual propaganda. The limits on propaganda are different from reporting -- failure consists of people rejecting your message, in whatever time-span you care about (Adams seemed to me to be aiming for transforming how people related to the environment, so long-term). -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
