HDR & “Photoshopping”

I was very pleased to be asked to contribute a guest editorial piece for February’s edition of Practical Photography Magazine. http://www.photoanswers.co.uk/ This allowed me to cover a topic that is important to me, namely “Photoshopped” pictures and the abuse of HDR.

The text of my piece runs……………..

We live in a world filled with extreme and “perfect” images, made to grab the five second attention span of a hard wired society. The digital revolution positively changed photography forever as technological advances overcame many of the crafts limitations; but these changes have brought suspicion and mistrust, directed towards digital editing. This is because altered images now dominate our lives, and advertisers, media, and governments use them to lie to us – we all now question the integrity of the pictures we see.

I came to this topic after fourteen of my pictures featured in a newspaper and online, and several readers commented that they were “Photoshopped”. They weren’t, but had been “altered” by my choice of film, filter, and exposure. Photoshop is an essential tool that I use every day, but I do so sparingly and carefully, and always try and get things right in camera.

I used to take these “Photoshopped” comments as a compliment, but lately I have realised that the integrity I tried to use in my pictures, was being damaged by the actions of many others. Basically my work was being rejected as false (and by extension not valid) because the world is now full of extreme images that have been largely made by a computer programme.

The next day I received an e-mail from someone asking whether to “Photoshop” their entries into a competition or leave it natural, as they thought the other entries looked “manipulated and fake”.

Later while out working I met a photography lecturer, who commented that they would “sort the light out later in Photoshop” and my mind started turning all this over.

This rant is informed by the current trend to (over)use High Dynamic Range. HDR is an important advance for photography, but is also the source of some of the most hideous, artificial, cartoon like, fake images ever, and when overused it raises even more questions about the integrity of digital imaging. Used carefully it can help produce amazing pictures which don’t look like some mad CG world. But the pictures are computer generated, and maybe this lies at the root of the whole Photoshopping problem? We allow computers to do the work and each time we use software to alter an image, the further from reality it is taken. This can also remove any originality from an image, just as selecting “Super Vivid” in-camera, or “Auto-Levels” in Raw processing, can bring a bland uniformity to the millions of images made by millions of photographers, all using the same factory and computer presets and trapping many in a homogenous digital straightjacket. Don’t get me wrong, this can be fine if that is the output you require, and you are happy with the results, but often these programmes are used to try and make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or merely to save a bad picture! That is where I have a real problem.

We have to stay in control of every stage of the picture making/editing process, and use previews and layers as a way of stepping backwards. Knowing when to stop is difficult, as it’s easy to be seduced with contrast, super-saturated colours, or by having 14 stops of dynamic range in every shot. We seem to be afraid of shadows, or true whites, and it’s so easy to “overcook” an image.

Cameras will take good pictures straight out the box without any real skills, but that also opens a Pandora’s Box of evils. The digital darkroom made photography accessible to so many, while software allows us to do things unheard of by previous generations of photographers, giving us almost unlimited degrees of control in making pictures, or recording our lives. But this can easily be used to distort reality so much that this adds to the suspicion that photography faces, and can devalue any picture that is taken, lessening the ability of photography to show “reality”.

Photographs only describe things as they are on the surface, and the camera always lies, so why do we keep adding more lies to that by over processing, and creating scenes that patently do not exist on this Planet? Barely possible colours, impossible shadow detail, highlights that are more saturated than midtones, luminous foliage, and metallic skies? This is surely not progress.

Yes, everything is subjective, and this discussion is endless, but I leave a few questions, as it is important to look at what we do, and to look objectively at the pictures we make. So, please ask yourself are you a “sort it out in Photoshop” person? Do you use a computer programme to replace good basic technique and great light? Are you a “good” photographer or “good” with computers?

And if you feel that none of this matters, step away from Photoshop right now, never touch the saturation slider again, and please do not even consider using HDR.

(All text ©Roger Coulam)