Something that has been on my mind alot lately, as I play more and more with my camera underwater, and trying to learn how to ‘tweak’ my photos to bring back the colours, is the number of photographers who advertise on Facebook feeds for their Lightroom and Photoshop presets.
I thought these were just settings you can import to bring back the right colours and tones to images quickly and easily – as the first thing we lose as we go further underwater is the colours – so without a strobe or video light, all the photos end up in various shades of grey…not ideal, and not representative of what is there.
Thats why I use Lightroom or photoshop – I am working hard to get the in-camera photo as good as possible re focus, white balance and composition, and then in lightroom I just need to tweak to get the colours back closer to reality. Its still a photograph of what I actually saw.
As an example, my pages header photo of the school of fish in the shallows as I came back from an afternoon dive in Tulamben, the sunlight streaming down and the colour on the fish was amazing, but the photo came out rather ‘flat’ so in Lightroom, I tweaked it back to how I remembered it, I have put the original and the tweaked version side by side in the featured photo for this post – and looking at them again in this frame of mind, I can see I have bought a fraction more blue back than was real – so Im maybe just as ‘bad’…
Another example below, the turtle and wreck looked a little more ‘washed out’ in the photo than they were, so have tweaked a little to make the turtle ‘pop’ more (and an expert in Lightroom or Photoshop would probably do a way better job). Its still the same thing I actually saw.
What has got me thinking though, is when looking at some of these presets, and I bought one to try, the package actually included various tutorials and other images, like sunsets, that you were then taught to overlay into your images. One of the tutorials show an original photo – and a nice one at that, but through all the changes made, it ended up a photo of something completely different – the girl was in a different position as he overlayed a different photo from the sequence of shots in place, he put a completely different sunset in there, and while it ended up an awesome image – it was an image of something that didnt happen.
To me, thats an artwork, not a photograph. I think they call them ‘composites’ where they are mashing several photos into one.
I guess its not hurting anyone, and if we get enjoyment out of viewing the final image whats the harm? To me, the harm is that I no longer look at a photograph and think, “wow thats awesome”, I think “wow thats awesome, but is it real?” Which is a shame I think.
If they are honest about it being a composite or artwork no harm no foul, but Ive seen various threads using this type of photo or others that I have seen being created in tutorials, and the posters on thread are congratulating the thread author on taking the “perfect shot” when they didnt actually take a photograph of that final image. What gets my goat, is that they say ‘thanks’ in the thread, as if it was real. Not “thanks, its a combination of a few photos” – which is honest – and they should be proud of the skill they have used to create the artwork.
Some of them are award winning “photographers”. Were the winning photos real or composites?
Anyhoo…thats my thoughts on it. Me, I will just keep plodding along, trying to get the shot as best I can in-camera and bring back that lost colour in post processing while retaining the integrity of the original image I saw.
What are your thoughts on photos vs artwork?
Photos are awesome and your article is very interesting and easy to understand. To say I am not a photographer is an understatement and I really understood the dilemma in making a photo look as real as you saw it when you took the photo without making it something it was not…very cool.
Thanks for stopping by. I guess if we just stay true to ourselves and what we saw that’s the main thing ay 🙂