before or after ? fix it in post?
Feb 26, 2018 17:31:24 #
TheDman wrote:
You're doing the same thing Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins did back in the 1860s. If it's 'cheating', then cheating has been going on since before film was invented.
Carleton Watkins body of work burned up in a warehouse during the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. So much for all the work and energy he put into his photography. People asked... What.... No Backups!!!!
Later he lost his sight, he was declared incompetent and put in the care of his daughter, who dumped him in the NAPA State Hospital for the insane. He died there in 1916. Buried in a paupers grave.
Not a very fitting photographers end.
https://everipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_Watkins/
Feb 26, 2018 17:31:57 #
blackest wrote:
why not both , in camera you are trying to take as good a photograph as possible, in post you are trying to make it better. Stop where ever you want.
Feb 26, 2018 18:08:11 #
Sometimes you feel like a nut sometimes you don't. I am seven and a half decades old. I have been taking pictures since I was about five years old with mom's old bullet 35 mm that dad carried all over Europe.I didn't know or care whether it was 35mm or 45 caliber. The camera took this celophane stuff you put in the camera. You rolled the little wheel until a number appeared.You looked through the peep hole and pushed the button. When the film wouldn't go any farther you rewound it and took it to mom. She took the film out and got it made into pictures. Neat huh? That went on for about sixty years. Only difference was I learned to put the film in and take it out myself and that when you didn't roll the film right you got double exposures and if the film wasn't hooked up right on the little cog wheel you could take pictures for days without filling up the film. Opening the camera to discover the cause of this mystery resulted in exposed film that turned black or was it white for some dumb reason. About fifteen years ago I got a little more serious about picture taking and advanced to point and shoots and digital. Around Christmas this year I really got serious about photography and learned about aperature and ISO and f-stops and wow! EXPOSURE. The internet has so many many people who know so much about Everything and they want to teach every body about it. I ordered a Canon dslr. I heard about Ugly Hedgehog and joined. Should've done that first. Anyway, (I have been accused of being wordy,) I have been learning all kinds of things over the past 75 years and expect to continue to do so over the next 20 , hopefully. My point being,after all this, is everybody gets a little testy once in a while. Some more than others. A few are always looking for an excuse to take a poke at the guy on the next bar stool for any reason. Most of us not so much. This group is so big (50 people usually on the same birthday!) We have several of all kinds of people and personalities. That's what makes this group so much fun. So let's timid ones not get disheartened. Play nice like you did in kindergarten even if you didn't have kindergarten. Be patient like patients in the waiting room with toe fungus or AIDS. And be brave! I'm still too scared to send in a picture. My new 50mm comes tomorrow. I will be brave and send three pictures for your disection, er critique. BoB
Feb 26, 2018 18:09:14 #
It's embarrassing!
A true expert in the filed and a published author contributes to our forum and instead of absorbing the education, asking questions and making constructive conversation, SOME folks begin carry on like third grades disrupting the class while the teacher is trying to teach and where the other students are trying to learn. It's disgusting!
If some folks want to do things the old fashioned way, they have the right to do so and ignore the latest technology. There are at least two very active Facebook groups dedicated to large format and film photography and in fact, one of then prohibits conversation about digital imaging. The people there collect old cameras, maintain chemical/analog darkrooms and that's fine. There is another group that is dedicate to Graflex large format gear and those folks discover all excited about stuff I sold off 30 years ago. I never considered going there and “trolling” their sites. I contribute to one occasionally because I actually used and know about the stuff that they now consider rare antiques.
Kodachrome, sadly, is dead! I shot it too. Believe it or not, we used to shoot 3-D slides at weddings with the Realist camera piggybacked on a Speed Graphic and all the exposure had to be perfect- we managed. I shot 8x10 and 4x5 transparencies for years- for commercial clients and the had to be pretty perfect and spot on as well. We did not “airbrush” transparencies, the retouching method was called “transparency stripping” and it was done with bleaches and dyes. It was extremely painstaking work done by highly skilled operators and it was prohibitively expensive unless it was factored into the budget in advance. If all of our work had to be heavily corrected, the ad agencies and clients would take a dim view of that and take their assignments elsewhere. In the early days of computer corrections, done at the pre-lithography/color separation stage, the clients and printers still expected good transparencies, color balanced and properly exposed for good saturation. Nobody retouched, stripped or airbrushed Kodachrome! In the early days, before I was old enough to be a photographer, it was briefly available in large format film. The it was manufactured only in 35mm and for a a short time, before its untimely demise, it became available in 120 roll film. 35mm and 2 ¼ transparencies were not good candidates for stripping.
So...if you knew how to precisely expose Kodachrome and all the other low latitude transparency films, you are certainly good to go in making great digital files that require very little or no correction.
This site is plagued with picayune semantics and etymology and a confusion to terms and nomenclature. In film photography, after exposure, the film's latent image has to be PROCESSED in order to turn the silver halides in the emulsion into the metallic silver of which the image is comprised. Of course this is POST- processing in that the process commences AFTER the exposures are made. In digital photography, a certain degree of “processing” takes place in the camera so the additional processing that takes place after exposure is now called post-processing but is oftentimes misconstrued or misinterpreted as overly manipulated, invasive, unnecessary tampering with reality or radical fixes for inaptly produced files.
In the analog darkroom, even the most expertly made negatives were routinely custom printed, that is burned, dodged, cropped, color or tonally balanced and aesthetically tweaked. The main reason was simple. The final product, mostly were prints. The human eye/brain/perception has an extremely wide dynamic range. A negative or transparency, viewed by transmitted light has a fairly wide range but not quite as extensive as our eyes. A reflection prints, especially those made on non-glossy papers, has the least range. The
object of custom printing, besides other aesthetics, is to get as much of the tonal information, from the negative, onto the print. Oftentimes, even wit ha high quality negative and with the best possible enlarger/paper contrast grade and surface/print processing combination and zone system application, some tweaking is required to get it all in. So folks, Ansil Adams, Edward Weston, Irving Penn, Richard Avadon, and the unknown good guy at Joe's Portrait Studio around the corner, all routinely worked their images in the darkroom- it is and was just part of the job. There is absolutely NO reason why this is and should NOT still be a part of digital photography when required. I say that when a file is so badly produced that it requires hours of correction, that is a POSTMORTEM, not post-processing.
Now that we are all so high tech we have adopted a few terms from the cinematography world like “editing” perhaps “post production” became post processing(?).
As far as special effects and radical manipulation are concerned, I look at it this way. There are landscape and wildlife artists (painters) who start off by working from photographs- wild animals and birds won't pose! .Some use photography for reference and others actuality project a slide or digital image on the canvas and create an outline and the work it up. Perhaps the first artist is an “artist” and the second one as a “draftsman”- don't know? Some work form memory!
So... if a photographer wants to keep his or her work as “pure” as possible and negate or minimize any post-exposure work, I can understand that. If other “photographers” want to start of with a inferior image or perhaps a decent one and, in effect, produce a piece of computer generated art- that is their prerogative and I have no reason too resent that or negatively criticize the work if, at the end of the day, it is aesthetically pleasing. Under normal circumstances, coming somewhere in between is practical, practicable and legitimate.
In the special effects department, nowadays, photographers, especially in the commercial field, are called upon to supply many graphic services that formerly were in the domain of color separators, pre-press houses and lithographers- things such as texture screens, montages, posterization, high contrast, stripping in logos and copy, dropping background in and out, and more. This is not bastardization of the image or some kind of untoward desecration- it's just solid graphic arts services or artistic impressions that are perfectly legitimate, especially if done tastefully and expertly.
In the portrait business, expert and subtly applied retouching is still in demand. In the film era, many studios employed expert retouchers who earned their stripes by enhancing portraits that were beautiful yet realistic and character retentive. The mark of a fine retoucher is they knew what to retouch, what not to retouch and when to stop retouching. These folks were familiar with facial structure and skin tone and worked hand in hand with the photographer and the darkroom crew. Nowadays, many photographs are doing computer driven retouching and are simply retouching the life out of their portraits. This is where the objection to “over softening” comes from. The traditional manual retouchers that are still around make the best computer retouchers and hopefully the will pass downow their knowledge of aesthetics to the new generation.
In today's consumer environment, high end top quality portrait photographers need to offer many enhancements, special mounting and display presentations and decorative services in order to separate themselves from the run-of-the-mill shopping mall operators. Again, this is not “impure” or overly convoluted if it is done tastefully and appropriately and coordinated with the images.
I just wish and hope that SOME folks around here would practice a bit of decorum and good manners and cut out all the bar fights and mud slinging. It does not lead to any good. There must be so much more to discuss other than the same old stuff about post-processing- or not, skylight filters- or not and JPEG vs RAW.
It's getting very unwelcoming!
A true expert in the filed and a published author contributes to our forum and instead of absorbing the education, asking questions and making constructive conversation, SOME folks begin carry on like third grades disrupting the class while the teacher is trying to teach and where the other students are trying to learn. It's disgusting!
If some folks want to do things the old fashioned way, they have the right to do so and ignore the latest technology. There are at least two very active Facebook groups dedicated to large format and film photography and in fact, one of then prohibits conversation about digital imaging. The people there collect old cameras, maintain chemical/analog darkrooms and that's fine. There is another group that is dedicate to Graflex large format gear and those folks discover all excited about stuff I sold off 30 years ago. I never considered going there and “trolling” their sites. I contribute to one occasionally because I actually used and know about the stuff that they now consider rare antiques.
Kodachrome, sadly, is dead! I shot it too. Believe it or not, we used to shoot 3-D slides at weddings with the Realist camera piggybacked on a Speed Graphic and all the exposure had to be perfect- we managed. I shot 8x10 and 4x5 transparencies for years- for commercial clients and the had to be pretty perfect and spot on as well. We did not “airbrush” transparencies, the retouching method was called “transparency stripping” and it was done with bleaches and dyes. It was extremely painstaking work done by highly skilled operators and it was prohibitively expensive unless it was factored into the budget in advance. If all of our work had to be heavily corrected, the ad agencies and clients would take a dim view of that and take their assignments elsewhere. In the early days of computer corrections, done at the pre-lithography/color separation stage, the clients and printers still expected good transparencies, color balanced and properly exposed for good saturation. Nobody retouched, stripped or airbrushed Kodachrome! In the early days, before I was old enough to be a photographer, it was briefly available in large format film. The it was manufactured only in 35mm and for a a short time, before its untimely demise, it became available in 120 roll film. 35mm and 2 ¼ transparencies were not good candidates for stripping.
So...if you knew how to precisely expose Kodachrome and all the other low latitude transparency films, you are certainly good to go in making great digital files that require very little or no correction.
This site is plagued with picayune semantics and etymology and a confusion to terms and nomenclature. In film photography, after exposure, the film's latent image has to be PROCESSED in order to turn the silver halides in the emulsion into the metallic silver of which the image is comprised. Of course this is POST- processing in that the process commences AFTER the exposures are made. In digital photography, a certain degree of “processing” takes place in the camera so the additional processing that takes place after exposure is now called post-processing but is oftentimes misconstrued or misinterpreted as overly manipulated, invasive, unnecessary tampering with reality or radical fixes for inaptly produced files.
In the analog darkroom, even the most expertly made negatives were routinely custom printed, that is burned, dodged, cropped, color or tonally balanced and aesthetically tweaked. The main reason was simple. The final product, mostly were prints. The human eye/brain/perception has an extremely wide dynamic range. A negative or transparency, viewed by transmitted light has a fairly wide range but not quite as extensive as our eyes. A reflection prints, especially those made on non-glossy papers, has the least range. The
object of custom printing, besides other aesthetics, is to get as much of the tonal information, from the negative, onto the print. Oftentimes, even wit ha high quality negative and with the best possible enlarger/paper contrast grade and surface/print processing combination and zone system application, some tweaking is required to get it all in. So folks, Ansil Adams, Edward Weston, Irving Penn, Richard Avadon, and the unknown good guy at Joe's Portrait Studio around the corner, all routinely worked their images in the darkroom- it is and was just part of the job. There is absolutely NO reason why this is and should NOT still be a part of digital photography when required. I say that when a file is so badly produced that it requires hours of correction, that is a POSTMORTEM, not post-processing.
Now that we are all so high tech we have adopted a few terms from the cinematography world like “editing” perhaps “post production” became post processing(?).
As far as special effects and radical manipulation are concerned, I look at it this way. There are landscape and wildlife artists (painters) who start off by working from photographs- wild animals and birds won't pose! .Some use photography for reference and others actuality project a slide or digital image on the canvas and create an outline and the work it up. Perhaps the first artist is an “artist” and the second one as a “draftsman”- don't know? Some work form memory!
So... if a photographer wants to keep his or her work as “pure” as possible and negate or minimize any post-exposure work, I can understand that. If other “photographers” want to start of with a inferior image or perhaps a decent one and, in effect, produce a piece of computer generated art- that is their prerogative and I have no reason too resent that or negatively criticize the work if, at the end of the day, it is aesthetically pleasing. Under normal circumstances, coming somewhere in between is practical, practicable and legitimate.
In the special effects department, nowadays, photographers, especially in the commercial field, are called upon to supply many graphic services that formerly were in the domain of color separators, pre-press houses and lithographers- things such as texture screens, montages, posterization, high contrast, stripping in logos and copy, dropping background in and out, and more. This is not bastardization of the image or some kind of untoward desecration- it's just solid graphic arts services or artistic impressions that are perfectly legitimate, especially if done tastefully and expertly.
In the portrait business, expert and subtly applied retouching is still in demand. In the film era, many studios employed expert retouchers who earned their stripes by enhancing portraits that were beautiful yet realistic and character retentive. The mark of a fine retoucher is they knew what to retouch, what not to retouch and when to stop retouching. These folks were familiar with facial structure and skin tone and worked hand in hand with the photographer and the darkroom crew. Nowadays, many photographs are doing computer driven retouching and are simply retouching the life out of their portraits. This is where the objection to “over softening” comes from. The traditional manual retouchers that are still around make the best computer retouchers and hopefully the will pass downow their knowledge of aesthetics to the new generation.
In today's consumer environment, high end top quality portrait photographers need to offer many enhancements, special mounting and display presentations and decorative services in order to separate themselves from the run-of-the-mill shopping mall operators. Again, this is not “impure” or overly convoluted if it is done tastefully and appropriately and coordinated with the images.
I just wish and hope that SOME folks around here would practice a bit of decorum and good manners and cut out all the bar fights and mud slinging. It does not lead to any good. There must be so much more to discuss other than the same old stuff about post-processing- or not, skylight filters- or not and JPEG vs RAW.
It's getting very unwelcoming!
Feb 26, 2018 18:11:05 #
leftj
Loc: Texas
Stein wrote:
Sometimes you feel like a nut sometimes you don't.... (show quote)
HEAR! HEAR! RIGHT ON BOB!
Feb 26, 2018 18:17:43 #
gessman wrote:
Apparently it all depends on what you want and what you're willing to accept. I've posted this url several times. Guess it won't hurt to post it again. It's worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBF1i8t8Skw
If you don't have time to watch the longer video at the url I posted above, here's the Cliff Notes, 1 minute and 23 seconds. Maybe after you watch this you'll go watch the longer version and see why this video exists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5QVEdG83W4
Feb 26, 2018 18:32:52 #
Feb 26, 2018 18:36:04 #
Feb 26, 2018 18:36:38 #
E.L.. Shapiro wrote:
It's embarrassing! br br A true expert in the fi... (show quote)
Wrong thread.
This long long diatribe should go in the thread which carries wisdom from the female PhD {not my wife}
Feb 26, 2018 18:36:38 #
Evidently the OP has never seen a shot that was so transient a situation that there was no time to think, let alone get it absolutely right. I would rather get the shot than miss it because my camera was not set perfectly.
Feb 26, 2018 18:54:48 #
Gessman cut to the chase, headed 'em off at the pass, pulled out his pistol and blasted the guy with the scimitar, "It depends on what you want and what you're willing to accept."
If you have the editing skill and want perfection go for it. If you can set all the controls and buttons and are willing to accept the results toss your editing program just use your camera and your skills. If you are like most of us though, you need to hone both sets of skills. Learn your camera, what it can or cannot do and how to make it do it. And hone your editing skills in an editing program you are comfortable with to get the best out your photos without getting rediculous, (whatever that is). BOB
If you have the editing skill and want perfection go for it. If you can set all the controls and buttons and are willing to accept the results toss your editing program just use your camera and your skills. If you are like most of us though, you need to hone both sets of skills. Learn your camera, what it can or cannot do and how to make it do it. And hone your editing skills in an editing program you are comfortable with to get the best out your photos without getting rediculous, (whatever that is). BOB
Feb 26, 2018 19:05:24 #
gessman wrote:
If you don't have time to watch the longer video at the url I posted above, here's the Cliff Notes, 1 minute and 23 seconds. Maybe after you watch this you'll go watch the longer version and see why this video exists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5QVEdG83W4
Worth watching the longer version, thankyou
Feb 26, 2018 19:18:20 #
frankie c wrote:
Hmmm... is it to much to ask? PROLLY :) nice thought though. How you doin?
I do post my self. I posted this question to see how many (because I wanted to know) here on UHH process in post more than they just shoot a great shot. So far the answer is that almost everyone these days does post editing all the time. I will do post for my art images( find them at http://elm7photography.zenfolio.com/ For my sports shots and groups I do nothing but Jpegs and let the studio do post if it is needed. It's rarely needed because I do it right the first time which keeps me employed by the studio. I almost always shoot jpegs and if they need any help such as very low light and having the wrong lens on hand I bring the jpegs into Adobe RAW. It was a great conversation thanks all who commented and included images. I am a retired Pro Photographer who finally went, well sort of forced into, digital and went back to work to buy digital gear.
Feb 26, 2018 19:22:04 #
I always try to get the best shot I can when I first take the image (composition, exposure, etc). In PP I then correct the things either the camera or I got wrong and then enhance the image to the way I saw it or the way I want it to be.
Don
Don
Feb 26, 2018 19:31:31 #
Yep always best get it close while in camera. I have all of these attachments I used during film days to put on the front of the lens to enhance the shot or to do special effects. I have experimented with them a little and plan to try and incorporate some of them into my portraiture and scenic shots. On filter is half blue I used it to enhance a bad sky, another is a black dot filter to enhance portraits, and another will give a darkened edges to the shot. They worked great and no post was needed with film. One brand was called Cokin filters. Another was a Monte Zucker tube arrangement that darkened the edges or applied a soft blur to the edges. I imagine they may still be out there. I have met some of the masters of Photography and they all seemed to know me by name when they met me. They all retired when digital showed up. Thanks for the conversation.
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