What are your views on your photography? Are you a purest who never tampers with your photos?
Do you enhance them a bit? Are you drawn to photos that have lots of enhancements or do you shy away?
Please post your personal views? Is there creativity and a skill to over enhancing a photograph?
If you believe it is ok to alter the photo -- is this a yes or no question.... or does the amount matter?
Reply to this In response to: Msg #204986 Good question and one I wonder about when I look at some of the incredible pictures on here and on instagram. I'm a bit of a purist and except for one blog all the pictures we have taken are unaltered or changed. The one blog, due to poor weather, I played around with the camera to try and make it look better ....didn't work. For my memories I like to see it as it was to my eyes when I was there.
Reply to this I'm a believer in using images straight from the camera whenever possible. However, almost every photo can be improved with a judicious bit of dodging and burning, sharpening, addition of contrast or a compositional crop sometimes. For me, as a travel and wildlife photographer, I'd argue that there's nothing wrong in enhancing an image, providing the end result still looks real.
Others may feel that photography is strictly an art form. For them, distorting reality to create a picture by pixelating, over-sharpening, inverting, posterizing and other wondrous Photoshop, Snapseed and Lightroom things, is okay in the name of art.
Each to their own, I say!
Reply to this The only enhancement I will do is crop, otherwise it is straight from the camera.
I do not even own any enhancement software.
Reply to this Every single photo I have ever posted on Travelblog has been through Photoshop first. The reason for this is simple; I want my photos to look their best.
Back in the days of film, your photos were 'altered' by the developer. A good developer could make your photos look good, a bad one make the exact same photos distinctly average.
These days almost everyone uses digital, and you can pretty much say that all digital photos are altered, even those straight from the camera. The camera itself will have generic software to alter the image. Once again some cameras are 'better' at this than others. Some of the newest smartphones can produce astonishing results quite easily, but these images have been highly manipulated by some very clever software. The catch is you have no control over this, and once an image has been changed it's quite difficult to 'unchange' it. By contrast I deliberately use cameras where the initial image has only been gently altered, so that I can then custom enhance the resulting image for each photo as I see fit, precisely so that, as someone said above, I can 'see it as it was to my eyes when I was there'. Mostly this is a fairly simple process of cropping the image to 6x4 and playing gently with contrast, brightness and hue, which usually takes all of about a minute, and in fact many images are hardly altered at all.
However I certainly have no problem with those who alter their images considerably more for whatever purpose, and see it as just an extension of the creative process... if anything it's an improvement over the past when typically the developer was a third party over which you had no say.
In short I certainly think it's ok to alter the photo... in fact I might even go so far as to say it's not ok not to!!!
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