I suppose, most pictures will still be taken by a camera in the future - most people want to conserve memorable moments in their life rather than create a different reality.
However, for many types of commercial illustrations, this could be much easier and cheaper than the traditional way of producing exactly the right image.
And if it becomes easy enough to do so, it wouldn't need an image expert like a photographer to do this.
Of course, a good photographer could produce a much more convincing image of the screws, for example, but how many users of a website or readers of a catalogue would appreciate the difference?
If it only takes the webmaster a few clicks to get the image that does the job, why buy one from an image bank?
It's a slippery slope anyway, how much "reality" is left in a heavily photoshopped picture we find in a travel catalogue for example?
Laurenz
2012/5/18 Karl Shah-Jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
a number of years back a former student sent me an image asking what I thought. It was a landscape, a bit empty in the middle, but I can see anyone who might have stood in front of suc a vista might have wanted to capture it. The foreground grass looked a bit ugly with daggy looking dead bits and while the fence was typically rustic, it was an imperfection that detracted from the beauty behind it. It was either the fence or the landscape, but the two together competed. I suggested they be cropped and the image be handled more as a panorama than a standard proportioned landscape. The light on the distant mountains was captivating - I was surprised this student hadn't gone over the top in photoshop cranking up the colours and pushing the image toward the surreal as he was prone to doing..
I asked him where he shot it..
He emailed back saying no, he'd just downloaded Belnder and spent 20 minutes learning how to use it, and the pic he sent was the first image he'd been happy with.. I felt a fool, but the realism was there.
http://www.petapixel.com/2012/05/15/photographers-youre-being-replaced-by-software/
kind regards / mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Laurenz Bobke
