What's more Important: Taking Pictures or Photoshop?

[dko22]

have to say that many of these photos look actually better in the original -- the processing is often tasteless in the extreme although there are a handful of decent ones.

[Warwick]

I had to look up T-Pain on wikipedia. Turns out it's a 'he' and he's a rapper. I'm still none the wiser about why he's like these pictures.

 

But on the subject of photography versus photoshop, I'm firmly in the photography camp. It's really clever to be able to manipulate images and create amazing effects and so on, but for me photography is about capturing the emotion of what Henri Cartier-Bresson called 'The decisive moment'.

 

 

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[CRAusmus]

Another side of the coin...

 

http://petapixel.com/2016/05/06/botched-steve-mccurry-print-leads-photoshop-scandal/

[TenLayers]

I think equal parts of Photography and Photoshop before taking each shot.  To me, no Photoshop, almost no photography at this point.  I'm always pre-thinking of how I am going to use Photoshop before I shoot something.

 

Let's take this finished shot.  It's a screenshot by the way and I boosted up on a curve so you can see them better.  And then the raw files I took of the bottle so I could composite later on. The background was chosen by the client.  You can see in #58 I was using a fill card in the shot only to light up the word Darioush better than I could in the other exposures.  It's way things are done now.  Yes, I could light the old way, I did that from 1982 -2001 exposing tens of thousands of sheets of 8x10 and lighting it the old fashioned ways.  But then you could only do one or two of those a day.  You'd spend half a day lighting one bottle, rush a sheet of film to the lab, wait an hour to see it and if it was good then you'd move onto the second shot of the day.  If it wasn't then you'd light some more, rinse and repeat.

 

This way, you shoot an exposure quickly and easily for only a portion of what you need knowing you'll build up the shot like that.

Photoshop is nothing more or less then any other tool I need.

 

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[stevezphoto]

Picture or the photoshop ... it's obviously not an either or situation. It's been said and shown many time how many of the great photographs were dodged and burned etc in the film darkroom. They weren't "straight from the lab".

 

I love the act of shooting photography. I do that for me. I don't need to publish for my own enjoyment. I do that for other people. And I have found in this day an age, that you gotta at least do some Lightroom boosting to get a pulse on social media. People are desensitized to what the real world looks like in an image. Even camera phones boost the JPGs pretty hard, and then you have IG filters. As experienced photographers here, we can see the difference between an overcooked image and one that is tastefully enhanced. The general masses do not have this eye. They need to be knocked over the head to be wowed. I'm not advocating a race to the extreme, but I'm not going to hate on those doing the full HDRs etc either.

 

It has taken me many years to gradually bring up the saturation levels of my images to where they are now. In the past I wanted to try to keep things more "realistic" ... but I eventually push it more and more. And people seem to enjoy my stuff more and more. So, whatever. If I am doing a wall print I would surely edit differently. But for the web, I generally do a faux-HDR look using LR. Lightroom is my personal limited. I rarely use photoshop, and have no interest in learning the fantasy techniques of the Russians on 500px. As far as the shadows goes up and what I can do with a gradient filter, that's as far as I do. Usually ;-)

 

Don't hate the player, hate the game. haha

 

~Steve Z

Edited May 8, 2016 by stevezphoto

[jlmphotos]

Man you didn't just open Pandora's box, you set it on a stump, took a 20lb sledgehammer, and slammed the sh*t out of it.  That's a touchy subject for many.  IMHO, I would rather take it in camera, than have to fix it later.  Though I find each image takes some very minor tweaking in LR.

I don't do cloning in and out.  I don't swap skies between images, I try to keep it as natural as possible whenever possible.

 

That's just my take.

[Tom H.]

Whatever works for you or the client, in the end only that really matters.

[Ycan2267]

The photograph. Nothing in, there is nothing out. Photoshop is a tool in the chain (a great one), but what you see in your mind's eye is where it all begins. The rest is just process. 

Peace be with you.

[deva]

People are desensitized to what the real world looks like in an image.

 

 

Not just in an image... 

 

Each person makes the choices they make. I prefer the real world. I dislike hyper-reality. It is everywhere in society these days, not just photography. I consider it an enemy of honesty and truth.

[xtrans]

You can not build a strong building over a weak foundation. Foundation and the architecture are at some point inseperable and interconnected. Like the photo and the post process. I think you can not go wrong if you excel at both.

[gordonrussell76]

T-Pain is famous for using Auto- Tune creatively.

 

In the music world auto-tune is generally used to fix a bad vocal, he uses it to push his voice to sound completely unreal in a creative way. Its an analogue to photoshop, purists hate it, however an argument can be made that anything that allows you to do something different or realize the ideas in your head is justified.

 

For a more recognizable example of auto-tune as effect, but not necessarily a good one is Cher, do you believe in life after love.

 

G

[mdm]

35f2 ooc jpg

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after applying two filters from Nik Collection

 

[Sella174]

Whenever this subject comes to the fore, I tell the following story: Many years ago when I bought my first DSLR - a secondhand Canon EOS 30D - I was told to also purchase a copy of PhotoShop. However, browsing through the local camera shops website, I noticed that an EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM lens cost exactly the same as PhotoShop. I went with the lens, as it gave me a level of quality that PhotoShop could never fix that was lacking on my EF 75-300mm lens. Afterwards, the JPEG's were so good I never felt the need for post-processing. Moral of my story, excellent lenses trump PhotoShop.

 

However, I can see the value of PhotoShop for people who are constantly "upgrading" their cameras, or switching brands. In this regard they never quite learn all the ins and outs of the camera in the same way that we used to with film, and PhotoShop thus provides the constant on which they build their photography.

[MacPhail]

Frankly, my opinion is "To each their own".  If heavy editing in software makes you happy and gives you results you like, awesome!  If you want to be a "purist" and use jpg's SOOC and love doing that...awesome!

 

So what is more important?  Answer:  Whatever makes you happy.

[Warwick]

I prefer Lightroom myself. It's non-destructive so if your skills improve or your tastes change over the years you can go back to an image and fix it.

 

 

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[Dook]

The title of the topic is misleading. Not every use of Photoshop is so heavy like in the given examples.

Photoshop doesn't have to mean unrealistic interpretation of reality, it can be quite the contrary - a tool to correct camera or photographer mistakes (color balance, contrast, dinamic range, leveling horizons etc).

It is also a mistake to think that a straight out of camera image is more real. There is more "Photoshop" in jpg processing than in basic Raw conversion.

No picture is real word. It is photographers subjective interpretation of real word, but that's not part of this discussion.

[ianrmontague]

Me personally, i try get as much right in camera and at the editing stage, i will do minor adjustments just to tweak it slightly.

And i find ACDsee pro9 does everything i need to do in my editing flow.

 

Ian

[deva]

Obvious photography is more important... to photography... paints and brushes are more important to a painter. If one has a camera (but not PS) one can do photography. If one has PS (but no camera) photography no can do.

[mdm]

Obvious photography is more important... to photography...

 

Yes, absolutely, but sometimes due to the lack of experiences my camera and I see things differently, so I need to slightly change the reality to inline it with my vision.

 

my camera's seen ducks...

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and I have seen Fireball...

[ErikN]

I try to get what I want in camera. If needed I'll do some work in Lightroom. HDR blending and panoramic stitching for example. If it's a tricky bracket I may take it into Photoshop to do some manual blending of the different exposures.

 

The more time spent with camera in hand instead of behind the keyboard the better for me. I do geotagging and keywording in Lightroom for most photos though.

[jlmphotos]

Aaaah the age old debate since Mr Knoll photoshopped the first ever image of his girlfriend on a beach...  I use LR and quite frankly the only time I go into PS is when I need to do more dust cleanup than LR allows.  The little spot removal tool in LR sucks.  I really don't know how to use PS that well and even if I did I kinda like to keep it real.  However, I do admire some of the work out there even though much of it is over the top. When does it become an illustration and not a photograph? But, to each his own.  I believe in you do your thing, and I'll do mine.

[mdm]

OK, this is a sooc jpeg w/o any pp...

 

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