Is Photoshop destroying the art of Photography?
Whilst there are many benefits to Photoshop people many people say that it is destroying the art of photography.
When you look at magazines and internet articles/forums on how to improve your shots, however they seem to just to be encouraging you not to worry about learning good photographic techniques and simply how to and fix it in PS It’s like trying to put the fire out rather than teaching you how not to start it the first place.
Photography is an art form and can be used to reflect and illustrate what you see or what you imagine; regard your camera as your brush and your software as your palette and canvas.
Sometimes it’s better to learn how to use filters, aperture, ISO, Sutter Speed etc, understanding camera settings and the effects they have on your images in order to get it right at the time of taking the shot, than spend hours messing about with Adobe Photoshop. After all as a photographer the less time in front of the PC, and more time behind the lens the better, particularly when free time is limited. More time out in the field rather than spending hours at a PC gives you more opportunity to capture that moment and to enjoy the natural world at work. Photography should be fun, exciting and free, it should be about being tied to a computer all day, what’s the fun of that?
I fully appreciate that Photoshop is useful, and we all like to recover those missed opportunity, but I really wonder if the tendency these days to use it instead of learning the correct technique is making us poorer photographers, or that we are becoming too reliant on it.
On the other hand Photoshop is brilliant for learning photography as when you take the picture you can change the settings on the camera - then when you get it into Photoshop you can change the settings then you will learn what to change on your camera next time like exposure etc. It can be good you have limited time in on location and can’t afford to be taking different images on different settings, because it’s all about the moment. So it’s useful or for those moments you don’t really have time to set things.
However - 'You can't polish a turd' - and that is true of photographs. Photoshop cannot correct focus or composition issues. It can correct things the camera got wrong, like white balance, and you can go to any extremes in processing to create a particular effect if that is what you want.
If you want to visually transform an image then that’s an entirely different kettle of fish. You can combine images, change skies, get rid of blemishes, clone out things, even swap heads and bodies – these are the things that are impossible to do in the camera.
Stuff you can only do in camera: 1. Correct depth of field / lens aperture 2. Correct focus 3. Correct composition 4. Correct shutter speed / camera shake. 5. Using a polarising filter
Stuff you can do in either the camera or PS 1. Colour balance 2. Sharpening (jpegs only) 3. using filters (on camera) or filter effects (PS)
Stuff you can only do in PS 1. Cropping and straightening 2. Dodging and burning 3. Adjusting low and high levels independently 4. Adjusting levels brightness / contrast, hue / saturation etc 5. Lots of strange filter effects. 6. Cutting and pasting part of on photo to another.
If you get it really wrong in camera write that frame off. If you get it nearly right you can recover in PS, and let’s face it most modern cameras usually do get it nearly right in one of the auto modes. That's the same for film / dark room photography.
I know photographers have very different opinions about this, what do you think?
by NATHAN KINNEAR
6 September 2010
This article is the opinion of the author and may or may not express my personal views, Pejay.