tcthome wrote:
I draw the line when it comes to letting the software choose the color effects of my pics & replacing a sky with one that I didn't take.
I have posted this before:
I was in a small town in Germany for a short period of time. It was a completely overcast day. During that short period of time, I saw two pictures that the other people I was with never saw. I took those pictures but it always bothered me with the gray sky. So I used post processing and selected a sky that was blue with some clouds. It took a snapshot and made it into a beautiful picture. A picture I was proud of.
Now, when I shot film, I never got into using the darkroom. So somebody made some choices for me in the processing of my pictures. Choices I did not make. Did that make my shots any less? When I'm shooting digital now, the camera has software that makes choices for me. I can change that software change the camera's settings, but it is still the camera making decisions to produce a JPEG.
So when I shoot RAW and get the data stream of what the sensor had, then I have to use post-processing to make decisions about the hue, the white balance, etc. Does that make my pictures any less? There I'm using PP.
So now when I use post-processing to swap out a totally gray, featureless sky for one with clouds and blue sky, does that make my picture any less? Does it make a difference if the sky is a picture I took at another time, or that I took it from a library supplied by somebody else?
AI is simply a programming technique to make more decisions behind the scene. Nothing more nothing less. If you're still controlling what the post-processing is doing, I do not see that it makes the photographer any less a photographer.
So we have a train of logic, a train of tools that stretch from the days of film and darkrooms to the current day with simply stronger tools. When does the photographer stop being a photographer in this series of progressions?
I used a speech recognition tool to write this message. Does that make it any less of a message? Actually, I shouldn't say that because it often makes interpretations of my words that I don't want but I am able to go back and correct them.