Some thoughts on Post-Production.
By Charlie Howe
21 March 2008
Some thoughts on Photoshop.
How many times have I heard someone dismiss a piece of digital image work as "obviously photoshop'ed" or "over produced", usually this is said with a disgusted or condescending tone in their voice. As if, because digital post production is easier and more accessible than film post production, that it is in some way inferior or less of a craft. Because the work was done with a different tool and a different skill set which is faster and more widely available, it is in some way not acceptable as a quality image. Because JPG is a digital community, by nature, this seems to me to be at the heart of image creation here.
JPG even goes so far as to discourage the creative use of Photoshop* in the guidelines. In the photo guidelines of JPGmag.com, "fake borders, partial desaturation (aka cutouts), and wacky filters" are actively discouraged with the impression given that they are not acceptable in the creation of images for this site. My question is why discourage creative imagemaking? From the "About JPG Magazine" page the following is the first sentence used to describe this site/magazine/community: "JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude". The word imagemaking is very important here because they could have said photography which has a different inherant meaning. Imagemaking infers the whole process from pre-production through image capture, and on to post production. What is wrong with taking a capture and changing it to fit the imagemakers idea of what a good or creative image is? I am also curious about the definition of "wacky filters", does that include adding a digital filter to warm or cool an image? How about using Curves to adjust the contrast?
When someone cross-proccesses or increases grain or contrast via traditional darkroom proccessing it is looked at as perfectly acceptable and "part of the creative proccess". Why not also accept digital darkroom work that achieves the same look and feel or even a different or new look or feel that traditional processing can not achieve? Contrary to popular belief, not just anyone can take an image, digital or otherwise, open it in Photoshop* and "proccess it" into a great image. It takes a specific skill set and knowledge of the program to be abe to get the look, whatever that look is, that the imagemaker wants with the tools available in Photoshop. Digital post-production maybe be available to anyone with a computer and some money, but so is traditional darkroom processing available to anyone with the space and money to create it. It seems to me as if we are applying the rules and limits of traditional post-production/processing to the "Brave New World" of digital photography. We have not evolved emotionally to match our technical evolution. We are still hanging on to the old ways, to the "traditonal" way of creating an image.
The fact of the matter is that every single image on this site has been digitally enhanced/adjusted. Heck, even film is enhanced/adjusted by the type of processing used. If the image was captured as a RAW file then it must have some adjustments made before it can be saved as a JPG or TIFF or any other file type. Even if was captured as a JPG the camera has automatically made "processing" choices based on the manufacturer settings and rules, which to me is like sending your film to the lab and letting someone else process it for you. There is no such thing as an unproccessed image in digital photography. So, who makes the rules on what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to digital post production? In this community, the editorial board of JPG magazine does. Many of the images I see on this sight are digitally enhanced or changed from their original capture by using different digital darkroom processes. Some are "overprocessed" for my taste and some could use more post production. This is my personal impression of these images but do I have the right to tell these photographers how to produce their work? Apparently, JPG magazine does believe it has that right and if we, as image makers, want to be a part of this beautiful community then we either abide by them or risk having our images deleted. That is the reality, like it or not. What do you think?
* (I am using the product name because it has become the universal word for digital post production software and I am including all other post production digital darkrooms under this umbrella term)
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