Yes I know I’m allowed to have my own opinion and that the subject is editing.
You state that the original photo had wire mesh across the photo which ruined the photo but you didn’t show the original photo with the wire mesh. You showed another photo with wire mesh across the photo.
Why even show the first photo if it has nothing to do with editing. If it IS however a photo you edited, why not add the original before editing it.
The way you wrote this post, makes the reader believe the first photo IS the finished product AFTER editing like a ‘before and after’ type experiment
If that wasn’t your intent, then I misunderstood your entire thread but that’s also very possible. I never edited a photo except to crop it.
I see photography as a process … setting up your camera, weighing up the scene, choosing your composition, taking shots, viewing those shots on you pc screen, deciding which to work with, making my image … something worth hanging on the wall. I don’t print my work and hang them on the wall, just being fanciful. The “making my image” part may involve all sorts of chopping, cropping & erasing.
What I like most about photography is making the camera see what the human eye/brain can’t see. It might be too small or something happening too fast. Good lenses are powerful magnifiers, cameras can freeze action or show motion blur, playing with focus & depth-of-field can give wonderfully pleasing results.
Editing or postprocessing should be seen as patching up what you failed to get right in camera. OK cameras don’t, as far as I know, clone out cables!
Thanks for that, @realspeed
I’ll have a look at Adobe Photoshop.
I don’t have a pic to edit on this iPad but I’ll give it a try next time I access my photo storage via my PC.
If Adobe doesn’t work for you, Boot, just google “free online photo editing” and it should come up with a variety of options that you can use - many of them you can use right on the screen, no downloading. They can be easier to use if you have an ipad.
I don’t know why people are getting hung up about the two photos being different. The point is to show a photo of a cheetah with the enclosure wires edited out, and then to compare that photo with one where the wires are still in place. It’s the editing that’s under discussion, not ‘look at this photo before and after editing’.
I also have never really got why some people think editing a photo is somehow wrong, even dishonest. Why? The photo is the property of the person who took it, and he/she can do with it whatever they choose. Personally I have always edited my photos to bring out the best in them, so that they look the way I feel they should. This can include editing out overhead wires, or a bit of rubbish on the ground, or even a small signpost if I feel it intrudes on the overall image that I wanted to capture. Think about it: how often do you go to take a photo, and notice something in the background that will spoil the effect? What can you do? It might be something you can physically pick up and move out the way temporarily, or you might be able to reposition your subject slightly to avoid the offending article. If neither of these options are possible, then you can edit them out afterwards. What’s the difference?
But surely that is the whole point, showing before editing and after editing to assess the procedure and the benefits? Couldn’t we all find two photos, one with wires and one without?
When I take a photo, it will come out as a “raw” file and not one which can be conventionally viewed. It’s a datafile of an image, but not an image in itself - although Windows 10 can see it as such. The idea is that the image is unprocessed and goes from sensor to mem card with almost nothing in between. So I have a process where I take a pic, download it to my PC, run it through either Lightroom or the software which came with the camera and apply stuff like colour correction, white balancing, adjustment of shadows, contrast, highlights, tints, gamma, brightness etc. After that, I can export it as a conventional .jpg image and then I may take into Photoshop to make any other corrections I feel is necessary, which may be straightening and cropping as I feel is required. The reason I do this is because I am using the camera to the maximum of it’s abilities in terms of colour resolution and dynamic range.
And yes, if I’m being creative, I will brush out unwanted stuff like cables, debris, idiot who walked into shot and whatever I feel shouldn’t be there in order to produce the pic I’m happy with. UNLESS I am merely taking a ‘snap’, where I am not trying to be creative or artistic and just want an image which is just a reflection of the view in front of me, where any changes I apply are minimal, such as straightening or maybe some colour or contrast tweaking. (These days I tend to use my phone camera for this type of thing)
That said, I aim to get any image in my camera to somewhere between 90-100% right with only extremely minor corrections needed, unless I’m taking images which need exposure correction in extremely bright/dark situations. I don’t particularly like pure Photoshopped images where the image/subject is false and has elements which were not in the original shot, but I do object to any image which passed off as real when it’s obvious it isn’t - unless it has been specifically stated the image is the result of Photoshopping, which itself lends itself into it’s own category of digital artwork.
Thank you. My point exactly.
Why even add the photos. It’s deceiving however I’m not bent out of shape about it. I can still appreciate the benefit of photoshopping even if I don’t use it.
No I don’t think it matters either way. If RS had posted a before and after, that would have pleased a lot of people on here, but posting two different photos, one with the wires edited out and one unedited still makes the point about editing in my opinion. The photos were similar enough for it not to be an issue. RS may not have kept the original of the one he edited, so he picked another, very close, shot for comparison. Fine by me.
