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Something that I keep seeing discussed on various sites, is the topic of post-processing. With the ever increasing popularity of photo-editing programs and the proliferation of digital cameras, there has been a huge upswing in the number of people now manipulating their images.
Obviously there’s nothing wrong with that and particularly if you’re shooting RAW, it’s even necessary, as the image will need certain adjustments made, especially sharpening. In fact, every digital photograph should at least have some sharpening applied to it, as each subject you shoot will require a specific amount; no two images being the same. A shot of a chrome and glass building can take a lot more sharpening than a soft portrait shot.
The thing is, we now have the power at hand to do so much more than that. We can add people into photographs later when they weren’t there at the time. We can airbrush out imperfections in the skin and even perform chin tucks and liposuction, but the question is, just when does this go too far?
There are two particular areas that I want to focus on, the first being the ‘plastic surgery’ I just mentioned.
I do a fair amount of glamour photography. In fact, it’s one of my favourite things to shoot, so I always do at least some retouching in post. It may be just some softening of the skin to reduce pores, wrinkle reduction or even change the colour of some lipstick, but there is always something to be done. I have no argument with that and most clients actively request it.
The thing that I’ve learned however, is to exercise restraint in certain areas. For example, if somebody has a large mole on their face, would/should you remove it? That’s a tricky question, but I would not , unless they specifically asked me to. Just because it doesn’t fit in with your idea of a ‘perfect’ photo, doesn’t mean that the subject isn’t perfectly at ease with it and may actually be quite distressed by you drawing attention to it in it’s absence. try to explain to someone why you’ve removed an ‘imperfection’ from their face. Not a comfortable situation to find yourself in, I’m sure.
OK, so that’s for private customers. You may be looking at a completely different situation when using a model. If you’re shooting a model, chances are you need to make the shot look perfect to fit the client’s requirements, so you’re able to work that old airbrush magic, but when does it get out of hand?
There was a bit of a storm a short while ago over a Ralph Lauren ad that had been processed to the extreme. So much so that it made the model look positively unnatural.
Now, I’m not passing judgement here, simply trying to provoke some thought. Ralph Lauren did issue an apology over the ad and explained that it had gone too far and shouldn’t have been released, but someone pretty high up the food chain must have OK’d it. This would be someone who, as a representative of a global brand, should exercise some modicum of common sense and responsibility.
There are those who say that this kind of advertising is a bad example to those who are susceptible to body envy and could even help to promote eating disorders to emulate these ‘models’. I don’t know about that, I’m a photographer, not a psychologist, but all those issues aside, it just plain looks wrong!
Who in their right mind would look at this and think that it was in any way, shape, or form, a picture suitable for anything? You just have to look at it to know that it’s wrong.
So this brings me back to my point; how far is too far? In the good old days of film, dodging and burning to lighten or darken certain areas of a print, was a perfectly acceptable practice, so why not now? Many people feel that the moment a photograph is altered, it ceases to be one.
Others feel that the taking of the photo is simply the first part of a process to show what they could picture in their mind’s eye, or even just realistically show what they physically saw.
A camera cannot reproduce the range that a human eye can, so what you see when you take a photograph, particularly outside, will often not be what you see on the screen when you upload it to your computer.
If you’re shooting on a bright day and you have some shadow areas, you’ll find it difficult (without using additional lighting or reflectors) to show all the detail in both the shadow and the highlight areas. We’ve always had to choose which is the most important area and expose for that.
Until recently, that is.
Enter the world of HDR. High Dynamic Range photography has received a very mixed reaction, ranging from utter disdain right through to almost evangelism and everything in between. I will be going into HDR in more detail at some point in the not-too-distant future, but I will give you a brief explanation as to how it works.
Basically put, you set your tripod-mounted camera to take a number of exposures, ranging from under-exposed all the way through to over-exposed. This can be done with 3 shots as a minimum, but with 5 or 9 seems more common, as it gives you far greater latitude when it comes to processing the images. These images are then combined in software. The most popular program is HDR Soft’s Photomatix Pro, although there are alternatives. Even Photoshop now has this feature, although I believe Photomatix still rules the roost.
So what does it look like and how does it compare to a non-HDR photo of the same subject? Well here are two examples. The first shot is the ‘correctly’ exposed photo. The second, the HDR.
You can clearly see the dramatic effect that HDR can have, especially when processed to this extreme. I have obviously boosted everything in this image, possibly way too much, but that’s the point of this post.
There are ways of having your cake and eating it. You can create incredible HDR photography that still retains a ‘realistic’ look, but my question is this;
Is this image still a photograph?