tdekany Loc: Oregon

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

SOOC is just what it states.
Could be good, bad, or mediocre.
Many people take it as a challenge to get PP quality out of the camera. I don't.

(Does that mean that they have the camera set for mostly what they can do in PP?)

G Brown Loc: Sunny Bognor Regis West Sussex UK

I am sure that Artists scream 'Rubbish' at art work they dislike, just as photographers do. With only a little bit of knowledge you can make out you are a qualified critic.
Even with no knowledge, everyone has opinions.

HOW things are made isn't really relevant....self made critics abound everywhere.

Have fun doing what you do - who knows... 50 years after your death what you produce now might well become the latest trendy work of Art..

AndyH Loc: Massachusetts and New Hampshire

Some quick tropes I've heard, with their real meanings...(not necessarily on UHH)

"I want to perfect the image when I take it" = "I don't know how to do post processing"

"You can't make a good image SOOC" = "I don't know how to do that"

"If you don't enhance an image, you're not making the best of it" = "I really like turning my sliders all the way to the right"

"Great photographers of the past didn't have post processing" = "They used magic to turn their negatives into images"

"You can create magic only in post processing!" = "I really, really, really like turning my sliders all the way to the right!"

I personally see virtually no difference between the film era post processing and the current era, except in the capabilities of the mechanisms. It's possible to overdo anything - and there were plenty of soft focus, artificially colorized, overly manipulated images a half century ago. Some of my high school classmates' graduation photos looked like they'd had Crayola applied, and "retouching" colors, frisket masks, and other mechanical tools were used to alter color balance, remove objects, and combine images.

Ah, but Nat Geo! Kodachromes! That's the ultimate SOOC! Riiiigggght. I remember getting those transparencies mounted right in the middle of the article about Africa or Nepal, no? They didn't make a negative of the transparency, shoot it through a screen to reduce it to printer dots, adjust the contrast, and print it on paper, did they?

Shoot however you like, but I do wish some photographic purists would come down a little from their high horses and recognize that other approaches can also be valid.

Andy

Bipod

You've got it backwards: the problem is that post-processing puts art into photography.

I completely agree that it's possible to paint with photography--but I never met a photographer
who had the knowledge and skill to do it well.

On another thread, we just heard from a poster who's solution to a blown sky was to go into
Photoshop and fill that area with blue. Well, that's one way!

There you are, sitting in front of your computer monitor, glazing and tinting an image file.
The scene you photographed is long gone, just a faded memory. And so is your visualization
of that scene. "Hmmm....what do I know about how the sky looks?" you think to yourself.
Aha! It's blue! Problem solved.

Painters have a rather different understanding of the sky--or even of how common, everyday
objects appear in different light. Painters understand the laws of reflection, color mixing,
atmospheric perspective, etc.

Could anyone here have painted the attached painting (by California artist Boyd Gavin)?
Really look at it. We've seen similar objects a million times: salt shaker, ketchup bottle, table top, etc.
But have we ever really looked at them--at how light plays on them?

If not, then we should be extremely cautious about messing around with how objects appear in
image files. The interplay of light is extremely complex, and changes can easily make the
image look unnatural and "wrong". It takes many years to learn how to make a painting look
right.

If you take the image file scanned from this panting and start manipulating it in Photoshop,
the way we so cavalierly do with our photographic images, running "sharpen", altering
highlights and shadows, chances are you will quickly ruin it, making it look odd and unnatural.
A photographer is not a painter, and shouldn't try to be.

In the golden age of "straight photography", processing was limited to dodging shadows and
burning highlights during printing. (Plus occasional bleaching or intensification of a negative.)
This was a conscious choice.

Pictorialist photographers beginning in the 1880s had drawn on their negatives and cut them up
with scissors-- but the straight photography movement on the West Coast in the 1930s shunned
that kind of manipulation. Photography was supposed to be honest, not contrived, and not
an imitation of painting.

The same, humble approach--aware of one's artistic limitations---can be adopted in digital processing.
Unfortunately, software packages like Photoshop offer hundreds of ways to draw on your image file,
paint on your image file, and cut and paste on it. Digital filters like "sharpen" do drastic things
to tone and gradation.

Photography is as much about looking as it is about snapping. But photographers are at their
best when they are doing photography -- not painting, drawing or collaging.. That was the fundamental
insight of the straight photography -- Adams, E. Weston, Strand, Lange, the later Stieglitz, etc--and it's still
true today.

Photographers are at their best with a camera in their hands, not a paint brush or its digital equivalent.
And as the saying goes: "true art is to conceal art."

Boyd Gavin, "Cafe Table". http://boydgavin.com/ https://natsoulas.com/artists/boyd-gavin

(Download)

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

You don't get to decide for everyone else what photography is "supposed to be". Granted, there is a lot of bad PP out there, but there were also a lot of bad painters who we don't remember. Photographers have been doing composite images, printing in skies from other photos, etc. from the beginnings of photography. When painters started challenging the idea that painting had to be realistic and turned to impressionism, they were ridiculed. Now the impressionists are loved by many people. Any time you start declaring what art is "supposed to be" you will probably be proved wrong. This is one of my photographs, a composite of two flower photos with tons of PP, but I think it retains a very photographic look.

tdekany Loc: Oregon

Bipod

I am not trying to decide anything for anyone.

But there is such a thing as good photographs and bad photographs (heaven knows!)--
just as there is good food and bad food. People's tastes differ, but nobody like a sandwich
made out of two shingles and a slice of vulcanized rubber.

Artists learn from the works of the great artists, and photoraphers should learn from the
works of the great photographers--not from gear manufactuer's ads and user manual
or the "buzz" created about new products by the fanboys on Youtube. Photography has
become more about gear than about the final image---because that's how to sell gear!

Most artists are extremely well informed on the history of art. But these days, many
photographers are woefully ignorant of the history of photography, or don't think it's
relevant. They think technology has nullified history.

If this is a New Golden Age of Photography, museums and collectors don't seem to think so.
Neither do critics and historians of photography.

Summed up, impressionism in painting was an attempt to portray light more accurately,
while being less detailed. Nearly all the impressionist painters used the traditional
tools and materials of painting: brushes, oil paints, etc. They had a new vision,
not a new technology.

Contemporary photography has no new vision, but a boatload of new technologies.
Some of these have been a boon to commerical photography and to casual snapshotters,
but has had a devastating effect on fine art landscape photography (which at the highest
level continues to use large format film, since there is no digital equivalent).

And contemporary photography--unlike any past movment in photography or art--
is being driven by consumers, not creators.

There are also some practical problems affecting digital works. Are they permanent? What
is an "original print" when you print on a computer printer? (If I'm going to buy a print, the
fact that anyone with a copy of the image file can--at the push of a button-- turn out identical
"originals" until the printer runs out of ink or paper is big red flag.)

To know where you're are, it really helps to know where you've been. How did photography
get to where it is today? What's essential to photography and what's just added fluff?
Which technologies help and which hurt the integrity of the image?

The future will not be kind to the work of photographers who were lazy, complaisant, or just
running with the pack of consumer chasing the mechanical hare of advertising around
the beaten track of profit.

mcmama

🤣

Bipod

Today we live in a sea of advertising images that compete for our attention.
The ad with the brightest colors, biggest flowers or sexiest model wins.

Once an ad has our attention, it quickly transfers it to sales text or product image--
it's reason for existing. A motorcycle ad may use a model to get the your attention,
but it wants you to look at the bike, not the model.

While the goal of adversiting photography is to grab attention, the goal of serious
photography is to hold it (the more you look, he more you see).

Forgive me, but there is only one thing missing from John's image: the words
"EAT AT FONG'S!"

It certainly grabs one's attention. But continue to look (dark glasses help) and you'll
notice that the white pedals are blown, the sky is an unnaturally saturated shade of
blue, and followers aren't actually attached to anything. There is less there than meets
the eye.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

It should be obvious I'm not going for "natural". I don't expect everyone to like it, especially the realists, but it works for me, and others have liked it also. I'm not quite sure why it would be an ad for a Chinese restaurant.

joer Loc: Colorado/Illinois

Any generalizations are bound to be wrong some of the time. On what planet do professionals not PP.

tdekany Loc: Oregon

The end result has nothing to do with what camera was used or what size sensor. A photo either grabs our attention or it doesn’t.

No new vision? What an arrogant statement. And it comes from someone who has posted not a single photo.

Since when are you to speak for the rest of us? Who put you in charge to decide what we like, or what we find original? First of all, you, like any one of us, has seen less than a trace of what is being created daily. Or are you trying to claim that you see very single photo taken every day? I didn’t think so.

And please stop with the camera company BS. Advertising features doesn’t make people think that they are going to become professionals.

All this nonsense, yet no photos from you personally. I wonder why. You will never convince anyone by badmouthing. Haven’t you learned that yet? Let your work speak for itself.

tdekany Loc: Oregon

User ID

1. Photogrphy is NOT "real".

2. PP has been necessary since the demise
of the daguerreotype.

3. Online forums are full of pompous jerks
[but those are semi-OK when read as just
entertainment .... ]

.