Photoshop, Real or Fake?
Written by admin on April 9th, 2007 in Photoshop.
When discussing one of my prints with “non-photographers” the topic more often than not shifts to equipment. “What kind of camera did you take that with?” Now that my answer is almost always “a digital SLR”, I always prepare myself for “Oh, it’s not real, it’s digital”
I’ve started to shrug it off and just move on but since I’ve been getting more and more involved with Photoshop, I’ve begun thinking about the topic of digital manipulation more. What is it that I am actually doing in my digital workflow?
The main thing that I am trying to accomplish when I load an image in to Photoshop is to ensure the image accurately reflects what my creative vision was when I began composing the scene.
Does this mean that I want a final print that always matches precisely what I saw in front of me? Not necessarily, and I’ll tell you why. I’m not a documentarian and I’m not a photojournalist, I’m an artist. I take three-dimensional scenes and create representations of them on two-dimensional media.
What I want to see in print is what I saw when I looked at a scene. I want a print that I want to hang on my wall. Does that mean that I add a polar bear to a beach image? No, that’s going into “digital art” and that isn’t where my interests lie. But it does mean that I may saturate the colors, I may open up the shadows, and I may clone out a soda can.
But how far is too far? I’ll tell you where my limit is and it’s “teetering” in my opinion. I shoot only Canon digital SLR’s and I seem to always have a problem with the dynamic range of my landscape work. I tend to run into the “Canon sky” syndrome – blown-out white skys…
In the past, I have bracketed my shots to expose for the highlights and the shadows and then blended the multiple images together. That method works pretty well but sometimes I run into masking problems that make me want to pull my hair out! I’ve tried sky creation (as shown in the image below) but I just can’t get it to look right.
My next step is going to be taking pictures of as many different skies under as many different scenarios as possible so I can build a library of sky images for “replacement” in any “blown sky” images.
Sky replacement and especially creation is as far as I am willing to go. In fact, some may believe that it’s too far.
RSS
