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-gavinYou've got it backwards: the problem is that post... (