To Photoshop, or Not To Photoshop? (an interesting question)
At the AGM there was an interesting discussion about whether or not the use of Photoshop gave some members an advantage in competitions, or might be considered cheating, especially if something is removed from the image. As I pointed out, the manipulation - or retouching - of photographs has been practiced to varying degrees since the early days of photography. Some photographers did their own processing and printing, which gave them complete control over how the final image would look. Others left the printing to a master printer, but worked with the printer to achieve the look they wanted. Techniques such as "pre-flashing" the paper under white light for a fraction of a second helped in the printing of a contrasty negative. "Burning in" and "dodging" were standard techniques to darken some areas of the print or lighten other areas, giving the image more depth, while the use of ferrycyanide bleaches were used to further emphasise highlights. Toning the print not only prolonged the life of the print, but alterd the "feel" or mood of the image.
"Chance favours the prepared mind"
Moonrise Over Hernadez, New Mexico is a famous photograph by Ansel Adams, a pioneer of modern landscape photography. The photograph was captured by Adams in 1940, on film on a large format camera while on the way to another location, but when he saw this scene he stopped the car by the side of the road and had to work quickly to capture the image because the light was failiing. After guessing the exposure because he couldn't find his exposure meter, he had just enough time for one shot.
The video below shows Adams explaining how he came to take the photograph, followed by his son pointing out the difference between the straight print from the negative, without any retouching, and the final print after many hours of work in the darkroom (an authentic print now sells for tens of thousands of dollars). Adams, who before becoming a photographer had a promising career as a concert pianinst, considered the negative (or, in digital terms, the raw file) to be like a musical score, the print being the performance in which the photographer interprets what is in the negative. He coined the term "previsualization" to explain how he trained his mind to visualise what the final image would look like before he pressed the shutter - which included thinking about the amount of development the negative would need and how he was going to print it - before he got the negative into the darkroom! It's interesting to note that Adams was still making prints - and re-interpreting how he wanted the image to look - nearly forty years after he took the photograph (he made 900 of them!). Adam's son explains that in the final image Adams had removed some of the clouds in the image by making the sky very much darker than it appears in the negative and in the straight print.
The Digital Darkroom
The point I wanted to make is that, although digital editing programmes like Photoshop, Lightroom, Paintshop Pro, etc make life easier for photographers today, they mostly replicate what photographers have done in the darkroom since the early days of photography. Today on a computer we can easily clone out distracting items. We can also make a composite image by blending elements from one image with elements of another. For example we can improve a landscape with a bland-looking sky by taking clouds from another image and blending them into the landscape. However, these techniques are not confined to the digital world. Photographers using film and a darkroom could blend images by sandwiching them together in the enlarger, while distracting elements could be painted out with a fine brush and special inks - a tedious process because the ink needs to be painted on in thin layers.
I recently started to use Lumiinosity Masks on some images. Luminosity Masks are Photoshop Actions that enable you to target specific tonal areas in an image (highlights, darks and mid-tones - and anything in between) and make adjustments to them without affecting other parts of the image which don't need the same level or type of adjustment. However they are really the digital equivalent of something called Contrast Masks, which are physical masks used with the negative in an enlarger in the darkroom, and allow the printer to make very fine adjustments to contrast and sharpness, or even print a negative which might otherwise be unprintable.
How far this could be considered cheating depends, I suppose, on how the image is used and how it's presented.
Falsifying the Record?
There's a photograph taken by Frank Hurley, the photographer on Shakleton's Antarctic expedition, which puports to show Shakleton and a few of his crew in a boat leaving Elephant Island, with the men left behind on the island waving them off. It's now thought that originally the glass negative showed more than one boat, but Hurley had painted them out to create a more "heroic" image of a tiny boat battling alone against the elements (it's also led some people to speculate that, far from showing an heroic lone boat sailing away from the island, the original photograph actually showed Shakleton returning with the other boats to rescue the men left behind). Hurley went on to "fake" an image of planes strafing the trenches during the First World War by combining images of aircraft with images of men in the trenches - altogether he used 12 images to create the final print. His reasoning was that it was impossible to capture the chaos of warfare in a single image, but the combined image reflected the reality of what he witnessed. (He thought of it as "making" photographs rather than "taking" photographs). Although this brought him into conflict with the official war historian at the time because they "seemed to contradict the integrity of the historical record", both his "faked" images and his "straight" ones have nevertheless been regarded as some of the most iconic images of the First World War.
Dead Men Talking
Hurley's composite photographs have their modern equivalent in a photograph called Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, Near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall - although he is probably better thought of as an artist rather than a photographer, using the medium of photography instead of paint or sculpture. Many of Wall's photographs are created as tableaux using actors, and for this photograph he created a set of a battlefield, placing actors in it in small groups and photographing each group seperately over a period of months. The final image was created by combining the seperate photographs in Photoshop. His intention was to create a photograph "of soldiers becoming aware of their deaths immediately after they had been killed" and spent six or seven years working on the idea before actually making the image.
On the other hand, a winning entry for last year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award was disqualified when it was realized that the image of an anteater in Brazil's National Park was too much like the stuffed anteater at the entrance to the park to be authentic.
What National Geographic says
National Geographic Magazine allows both composite images and dodging & burning, but not cloning:
Combination Images.To be eligible for publication in National Geographic magazine, the images must be combined parts made at the same time. Don't submit final images where the foreground was shot at noon and the sky at sunset. We the editors do encourage creativity with your photography, as certain select assignments may allow images that are composites taken from different times.
Dodging and Burning. Brightening or darkening specific areas in an image is allowed but should be kept to a minimum and not done to the point where it is obvious. Your goal in using digital darkroom techniques should only be to adjust the dynamic tonal range and color balance of an image so that it more closely resembles what you saw and communicates the mood of the scene.
Kasbah Tebi
Finally, this is a photograph I took while on a photography trip to Morocco in April. It's of Kasbah Tebi and was taken shortly after sunrise. (Incidentally there is an area behind the gateway on the right of the picture which was used to create the arena in the film Gladiator).
With the exception of the sky, the exposure was pretty well spot-on (maybe slightly underexposed), although with hindsight the sky exposure could have been taken care of by bracketing, and then blending different elements from each exposure in Photoshop (a neutral density filter wouldn't have helped because it would have affected the top of the Kasbah). The unretouched raw image has all the information, but doesn't do justice to the rosy glow of the emerging sunlight on the pink sandstone walls of the Kasbah. To achieve an image which better conveyed what I saw and felt at the time, I made some basic adjustments in Lightroom (adjusting the black and white points to slightly increase the contrast) before exporting it to Photoshop, where I used luminosity masks to darken the sky and cloud, and increase the contrast and saturation of the walls of the Kasbah. I finished off by burning in areas around the edge of the image and dodging some of the sunlit areas to draw the eye into the centre of the image - essentially working with, and enhancing, the lighting effects that are already there. Although the final image was created in a computer, the techniques I used could also have been achieved in the darkroom - although colour negatives are trickier to work with than black & white, and I think impossible with transparencies (I haven't tried it so I don't know). Although I like the image it's probably not one I would enter into a competition (probably) as I don't think it's quite strong enough. (Perhaps we should have a session sometime called Heroic Failures, so members can show maybe two or three images which they feel didn't quite work and comment on why. Being able to distinguish what works from what doesn't, and why, is a good way to improve your photography - what Ernest Hemingway referred to as having "a built-in shit-detector").
Obviously not everyone can afford Photoshop or other editing programs, or spend time editing their images (although sometimes I've only needed to spend maybe 5 or 10 minutes in Lightroom to achieve the look I want). But if you shoot jpegs your camera will do a lot of work for you anyway (in which case it may not be wise to re-edit them in editing software, as it's likely to degrade the image).
Having said all that, it's worth remembering the adage that Photoshop can't make a bad photograph into a good one, but it can make a good photograph into a better (or even great) one.