thomasdwiers Loc: Green Bay, WI

I had the same thoughts shortly after being bitten with the "Photography Bug." But that all changed when I began to shoot in Raw and discovered the wealth of information (using Lightroom) that was captured in my images. I believe that it is my responsibility to process that information to produce the most desirable image possible. I also believe that this is the attitude that many "successful" photographic artists have employed for years!

Wilderness Images Loc: Apache Junction, AZ.

Any time someone tells me that I've overdone the Post Processing, I always tell them that I'm re-creating what my mind and heart saw and felt when I took the shot.

Jack Olson in Apache Junction

traderjohn Loc: New York City

No, you are not cheating. It is the utilization of assets. All is good as long as this use of someone else's genius you do not come away thinking you are an artist. You are a photographer.

Gitchigumi Loc: Wake Forest, NC

It’s not cheating… Lightroom allows you to take a digital image and massage it to produce a finished image. This much the same process, only digital, as doing a film negative in the darkroom. Imagine Ansel Adams processing an image in the digital realm. Welcome to LR, btw… as you learn to use it, you will soon appreciate the many benefits it offers. 👍👍

CanonShot Loc: Lancaster County, PA

CanonShot Loc: Lancaster County, PA

I concur with Jerry's response.

compilot Loc: ARIZONA

It is not cheating at all. In B&W film days, dodge and burn in the darkroom was necessary on many shots. I do not see the difference. Thanks for your post, interesting.

Lucian Loc: From Wales, living in Ohio

Back in film days, if you saw a scene that was obviously in colour and you then used B&W film in your camera and produced a B&W image, were you cheating? Of course not. Your eye has a far, far greater dynamic range than any camera sensor currently available to us, so your eye sees what is there, though your digital camera cannot reproduce that range. Take a stock image with that camera and print it on a cheap printer and you don't get what your actual eye saw. Therefore, you use PP to get what your eye actually saw, like your first boat image, so were you cheating? Of course not.

A person discovers a painting set and paints a scene that they have in their mind, or uses more vivid colour paints to depict a scene, than were actually there on the day, is this person now cheating? Of course not, so now go and do whatever you want with Lightroom and NEVER worry again.

AzPicLady Loc: Behind the camera!

I love in a world of artists, and they call it cheating. When I can do something in LR that's one click of a button, and they work for hours to get the same result - yes, they call it cheating. I do very little and always try to stay true to what I SAW.

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

Compared to LR, Photoshop can take you to a whole new level of "cheating!"

GeorgeFenwick

It is not cheating, but it may be competing. This forum has made that clear to me. Personally, I don’t enjoy time working on a computer so I don’t edit my shots. Other things force me to spend more time than I like chained to the computer. To me, the fun of photography is the time in the field and the editing is drudgery. Am I alone feeling this way?

charlienow Loc: Hershey, PA

If its cheating most of us on here are guilty...I rarely have an image I dont do something to, and hopefully make it better...

Chuck

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Lucian, you're onto something here. These two pair of images attempt to illustrate that.

In the first, I photographed my friend in a graveyard in January of 1975 on Tri-X film. In 2021, I copied the negative to a raw file with a digital camera, ran it through Negative Lab Pro, a plug-in for Lightroom Classic, then finished the B&W image in Lightroom Classic and exported a JPEG. The second image is a neural filter applied to the first image, in Photoshop, with no additional processing except conversion of the 16-bit TIFF to 8-bit JPEG. It might look almost normal to a casual observer, but in the original scene, the ground was brown, dead leaves, not green weeds. And her shirt was green and white, not gray and white. But her hair was very close to that color. Her skin was much more pale.

In the second, I photographed a statue at a museum I visited later that same year. Again the original was on Tri-X B&W film, copied digitally, processed in NLP and LrC. The derivative illustration was also done with Photoshop Neural Filters.

In both scenes, everything relied upon post-processing. All four images are mere representations of the original scenes. None of them is TONALLY accurate. But in all cases, I altered nothing structural within the scenes. Hopefully, the final images are mildly interesting. Was any of this cheating? Not to my mind. I was just using common tools to make images.

©1975, ©2021, Bill Burkholder

(Download)

Eleanor, Color, ©1975, ©2021, Bill Burkholder

(Download)

Metal Statue, ©1975, ©2021, Bill Burkholder

(Download)

Metal Statue Photoillustration, ©1975, ©2021, Bill Burkholder

(Download)

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

As a kid of 13, my youthful impatience was superseded by the discovery of how much better I could make prints than the corner drugstore did. My desire to make something look good overcame my sense of drudgery.

But at 30, after working 45-70 hours a week as a multi-image and video AV producer, the drudgery got to me. I put down the camera for over a decade (at work), and photographed only personal family events.

Around the turn of the century, I was managing the digital departments of a portrait lab as we transitioned from film/optical processes to digital processes. That "trip" and the new technology took the drudgery out of it.

I still have moments of frustration with process, but so long as I have a purpose for the images, motivation isn't a problem.

BurghByrd Loc: Pittsburgh

Photographers have been dodging and burnind since the first shutter was snapped. Lightroom PP is no different, just a different medium. Nice shots here.