It’s a question I’ve received a few times regarding some of my photographs. It’s often asked with slight negative tone like they are saying, “if you used Photoshop, I’ll be less impressed.” I saw a comment on a fellow photographers fan page where someone commenting on one of his photographs said, “…tell me u [sic] don’t photoshop these, at least not too much!!” That actually got a little bit of a rise out of me. When I’m asked, I usually tell people (as did the photographer who received the comment), I use Photoshop to make some minimal corrections to ensure the final print is representative of the scene I photographed. But what exactly does that mean?
First I should say that the word “Photoshop” is thrown out there often by people who have never actually seen or worked with the program. Like “Google” it has become a flexible word that can be a noun or a verb, so I’d like to take a few moments and share some insight into the Photoshop software and talk a little bit about “manipulation” of digital images.
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. Its first published version, Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990. It grew into the “industry standard” for graphics editing long before digital cameras had become the norm for most photographers. Today, Photoshop is in its 11th iteration and will probably have a 12th version out this year (2010). I should mention that in addition to Photoshop, there are many, many other image processing and manipulation software products out there. However, Adobe Photoshop is considered to be the “industry standard”, but it isn’t the only fully capable product available.
Over the years, the Photoshop brand has been expanded into some similar but different products including Photoshop Elements, a simpler and less complex version of full Photoshop, and Photoshop Lightroom, a software package targeted specifically at photographers. But, you might ask, “I thought original Photoshop was targeted at photographers?” No, not really, I’d venture to say that it was targeted at commercial artists for the use in marketing, advertisements, and other commercial ventures. In the 1990s, a “professional” digital camera, which was 1.3 megapixels, sold for $13,000 (yeah, no kidding), and had pretty poor quality output. It wasn’t practical for most working photographers to take digital photographs at that time. Film negatives and slides would need to be scanned into digital files and opened in Photoshop to be edited. Recently, Photoshop Lightroom has become very popular with photographers for several reasons, but I won’t get to in that in this article. Photoshop itself didn’t have the ability to work with digital RAW files until 2002. A digital RAW file is a proprietary, unprocessed digital image file that advanced cameras create. They are sometimes referred to as a “digital negative” and taken on their own, usually don’t look quite right. They have to be processed (akin to developing film) and edited to look good.
Which brings me back to the original topic of this article, “Was that Photoshoped?” If a photographer is shooting in RAW mode, which I do 99.9% of the time, the answer is “yes, absolutely!” And here is the kicker: there’s nothing wrong with using Photoshop, in fact most photographers MUST use it if they want a nice looking photograph! A camera that creates a JPEG file is actually a manipulated file out of the camera. The camera uses its internal computer chips to adjust the image into what it thinks it should look like and then compresses the file so it is smaller. Digital cameras today are amazingly good at that, but not perfect. Most advanced amateur and professional photographers will shoot in RAW format which gives the photographer the most digital information to work with.
Most people who enjoy photography as an art form know who Ansel Adams is. His prints are absolutely incredible. Not only did he make great compositions, his prints have immense depth and dynamic range. Ansel didn’t have Photoshop, but Ansel was a master at manipulation. “What did you say? Manipulation? Ansel was a purist, wasn’t he? He used large wooden cameras with big sheets of film and he worked in a darkroom! He wasn’t like the photographers today “Photoshopping” their images to make them look better.”
I’ll say it again, Ansel was a master at manipulation. Yes,“manipulation” has a negative connotation, but my intent in using that word is to equate it to what some people (wrongly) think of when they hear a photographer used Photoshop. Ansel didn’t follow “the directions on the package” so-to-speak, when it came to taking a photograph and creating a print. He was a master of visualization. When he saw a scene, he could see what he wanted his final print to look like. He knew the important elements of the image that should be emphasized to have the effect he would want. To do this, he used several steps. First, he would determine how he should expose his film.
Because the human eye can see many more levels of light than film or a digital camera, a photographer must choose what elements of a given scene are the most important to ensure they are properly exposed. Ansel would do this and adjust his exposure appropriately. Then, he wouldn’t just develop the film based on the manufacturer’s directions; he would over or under process the film to manipulate how the lights and darks would be balanced.
Once he had his film developed he would choose a photographic paper that would best suit his needs. For film photography, there are several types of paper. Some help increase contrast, that wasn’t naturally there, or maybe develops blacks better, etc. Then the real manipulation would start. He would make some areas of the print lighter or darker using a process called dodging or burning. He’d make certain blacks even darker and some whites even whiter thereby <b>artificially</b> creating a greater dynamic range on the print than what the film actually captured. He would use techniques to increase or decrease apparent sharpness and contrast. To say the final print represented exactly what your eyes would have seen had you been standing next to Ansel when he took the photograph would be a complete fallacy. Does that lessen the work that he did? Not at all.
Do you think anyone ever asked Ansel, “Hey Ansel, that’s a really nice print, was is ‘darkroomed?’” Of course not! “Did you darkroom that print? It’s just too good to be true.” Well, it’s is probably accurate that the final print is too good to be a true 100% match of what the scene really looked like, but is that really the point of photographic art, or is it to convey the artistic vision of the photographer? I think it is about vision, and Ansel had incredible vision.
The photographs I put on my fan page or my web site is based on my vision. I use Photoshop to “dodge and burn”, to soften and sharpen, to color correct, to change hue and tone, which are all actions a traditional film photographer would use in a darkroom. Can Photoshop do even more? You bet it can, and sometimes I do more than “the basics”. You can do amazing things with it including creating a photo-realistic image from practically nothing, but it’s pretty rare that a photographer goes that far. And if I go that far, I won’t try to pass it off as a minimally corrected image, I’ll let you know.
So, I would recommend that you not get too worked up about whether and image has been “Photoshoped” because chances are, if it’s been taken in the last 5 to 10 years, it has been, and before that it, was “darkroomed”, and rightfully so.
