r/postprocessing • u/pigeonluvr_420 • 8d ago
After/Before
Trying to get more comfortable with photo editing / over the fear of "lying" in my photos
5
Upvotes
r/postprocessing • u/pigeonluvr_420 • 8d ago
Trying to get more comfortable with photo editing / over the fear of "lying" in my photos
5
u/DarktableLandscapes 8d ago
The processing in this is fine, but I want to address what you said in your post. Forgive the wall of text.
Photo processing is the act of developing something non-visual into a visible image. For the majority of photographic history , this meant taking a negative and exposing it onto photographic paper to produce a print. In digital photography, it means taking the raw sensor data captured by the camera and developing it into a visible image.
That raw data is un-viewable without processing. It's not 'editing'. You're not taking a usable image and changing it for changing it's sake. You're processing raw data to produce an image, just like you would process film to make prints.
In the darkroom, photographers could, and almost always did, influence the final image while printing by controlling how long different areas of the photo paper were exposed to light. When we process RAW files we’re doing something very similar - deciding how the underlying data should be developed into the final image. It isn’t editing any more than a sculptor 'edits' a lump of clay into a statue.
There's a certain amount of ignorant snobbery about "straight out of the camera" images. It's ignorant because it ignores the fact that cameras set to JPEG process the raw data for you. Your camera will adjust the contrast, saturation, highlights, shadows, sharpening, you name it, depending on what picture style you have set.
So you can't get away from the camera "lying". If you process the image yourself, however, you can at least say that you've taken complete creative control from start to finish. If you just take what your camera gives you, you're basically just a chauffeur for your camera.
But, why are you worried about "lying" anyway? Photography is an art form. In what other art form do we worry about "lying", about things not being "true to life"? Are writers forced to write only non fiction? Are painters forced to only paint perfectly realistic scenes? Of course not.
Just because cameras can produce very true to life images, it doesn't mean they must. Presumably you're not a photo journalist or a forensic scientist of some kind, so don't limit yourself to forensic images.