anyways, there's a common stigma associated with editing photos now in the digital age, especially cause you can make anything look real with photoshop now (I ASSURE YOU THIS IS NOT THE CASE. CLONING IS DAMN HARD AND ANNOYING AND BALLSBREAKING, KTHX. and i don't know how to do the rest anyways, so i wouldn't know). basically, it's like: if it's not what was actually there, and not how it actually looked, U R TEH CHETER/LIER. however, what's captured on-camera is not neccesarily a) what "real life" looked like b) what the photographer wanted to capture. B is, obviously, a bit more controversial, so let's talk about A first.
first of all, there're two file formats all DSLRs and most upper-end point and shoots have - either JPEG, or RAW (RAW itself isn't actually a file format, but a type of one. examples of RAW files are .DNG (digital negative ---> the most universal one, used by Adobe), or .PEF (a type of RAW file that's propietary to Pentax). for the sake of simplicity (there isn't a massive difference between various RAW formats anyway), I'll just refer to RAWs as...RAWs.
What JPEG is is the quick and dirty, i just wanna facebook these pictures later type of format. well, actually, they were originally RAW files, and then the camera just extracts basic or image data (something along those lines - this process i'm not particularly knowledgeable on) from it, and throws away the extra. it then applies any camera presets to it. by default, most manufacturers' cameras are set to give it a bit of a saturation and contrast boost, depending on what mode you've got it on. sometimes this can actually be quite significant.
RAW files, on the other hand, are what the sensor captured when the shutter was opened. that's it. nothing done to em. it's somewhat comparable to being given a finished massive jigsaw puzzle, glued and framed to be hung on a wall, as opposed to buying the box and putting it together yourself (sort of. it's not like a RAW file makes you stitch together an image or something, but this analogy makes more sense in a bit). the thing is, in a picture, JPEG blacks are black. JPEG whites are white. in a conversion to JPEG, the detail there is lost: in a RAW file of an identical scene, the RAW file's whites are not actually white, just a really bright grey, and, likewise, it's the same with the blacks - they're just a really dark grey. what this means is that a lot more detail can be recovered from the shadows and highlights - detail that would otherwise be lost in a JPEG.
how does this translate into real world consequences? the most obvious answer is in landscape photography: you can now have a higher dynamic range, or, in simple terms, the range between the darkest possible detail captured, and the brightest. so, a sun with a dark foreground in shadow, say a rock, will no longer result in a totally white/burned out sky or a totally black/burned out rock (or at least, significantly less so in both cases compared to an equivalent JPEG). if you think this is bad because you're revealing detail through editing, something "any good photographer could skillfully do without editing" (well technically they could, but it costs more money and more time to write about, and it's a much less versatile/effective option in most cases), consider that the dynamic range of the human eye is vastly greater than any camera sensor out there right now, be it a $100 point and shoot or $30,000 medium format camera. it'll be a looooooong time before technology progresses to the point where camera sensors' DR can match that of the human eye, or what you actually saw.
Now, if you're anti-editing, because editing is horribad and hides photographers' flaws, maybe something should've rung a bell, or maybe not. either way, reread 2 paragraphs back: JPEGS edit your photos for you. they apply a contrast or saturation boost, among other things, depending on the settings, etc. And since RAW does neither of those things, wouldn't the best thing to do then is to just take every RAW photo and convert it into JPEG with no adjustments, on a computer, and leave it at that? short answer is, no. that's also the long answer.
see, what that doesn't take into account is...well, quite a few factors, actually. here's a common one: lens/camera shortcomings, for example, lens flare.
take this image for example, it's a "before"
and here's the after:
now, if you saw the "after" and was like wow, helon is a damn god at photography, and then saw the original, you'd go wow what a fake he just used editing to make his photo look good. but how's that work? the original image lacked contrast not because the scene lacked contrast, but because my lens flared (not the big colorful circle type. there's two types of flare, that and 'veiling flare', which is basically what you see - looks like a veil's over everything, and it robs the image of contrast quite severely. caused by internal reflections and such within the lens). so, then, isn't it more of the unskilled photographer's decision to leave this image unedited, despite being marred by flare, and the more skilled thing to do to edit it to restore it to how the real scene looked like? not to do so would be unfaithful to the original scene, and letting the shortcomings of the middleman - the camera, lens, the technology as a whole - determine your final image, instead of the photographer.
so, what else can justify editing?
for one, the exposure. now, if you normally shoot manual or at least use exposure compensation while on auto or semi-auto or whatever, you'll probably jump on now but go aha! a good photographer would get it right the first time. and yknow what, that's absolutely true. RAW files contain so much more data (apparently, they're just data files, not image files) than a JPEG that it's easy to just shoot whatever and fix it later in post. that kind of attitude, IMO, is just lazy. i mean, there's no reason that that can't produce good images, but it's lazy. though then again, it takes more work afterwards so, meh. RAW is quite good for patching up the occasional accident or whatnot though, to some extent (if you have a totally black or white image it probably won't fix that unless you have an amazing camera in which case i need it or i'll die of massive internal organ failure. you don't want that on your conscience.)
but, what if getting it right the first time, in-camera, meant getting it wrong on purpose?
for example, recently (ie in my last blog post LMAO) during a sunset, i took a look at the histogram of an image exposed "correctly" and saw that a lot of the blacks were burnt out and had no detail left in them, but the colours pretty much matched what i saw with my eyes. now, what if i wanted to retain that shadow detail while having the colours match still? i can't do that in-camera: overexposure causes colours to wash out and lose contrast. therefore, the smart thing to do would be to deliberately overexpose some, so that there's both good shadow detail and highlight detail retained in the file, and then restore the colours later. and that's exactly what i did here (not stroking myself at all with that):
before:
and after:
and again in this shot, you'd accuse me of embellishing the epicness of this sunset. the orange is a lot more vibrant, there's a lot more contrast, the water looks richer, and the rocks look less faded. but now that we know that the first shot is technically overexposed (the camera takes an average of the scene, and in this case, there's a higher average of bright pixels than dark. hence, overexposed), its colours are washed out compared to a technically correct exposure shot, in which shadow details are lost. here's a (indirectly comparable - i didn't have this post in mind when i took this shot, and it was taken a few minutes after these vertical ones. if you've ever watched sunsets, you know how quickly the colors can change on you; as such, don't pay attention to the specific colors so much as the richness and saturation of them) shot that was eyeballed to be about similar to the actual scene, but nearly scrapped because of the burnt out, unrecoverable shadows (okay i wasn't gonna scrap it cause i took it for a pano, but otherwise i would've. this was totally untouched except for a conversion to jpeg from raw:
see how the colors are much deeper and more saturated, much more similar to the second, "fake" image. however, also see that the island is completely black. and see how in the final result of the vertical shot, the best of both worlds was achieved: plenty of detail there with the rocks, and quite good, accurate colours.
other things, though these things are much more easy to justify, that can be counted as editing are:
-white balance change/fixes
-noise reduction
-sharpening
-masturbating
sorry, just wanted to see if you were still paying attention there or are watching sxephil's videos right now. if so, gtf back here bish. anyways, from top to bottom:
-white balance is kinda hard to explain in words, but really easy to give examples of. it's basically how "warm" or "cold" a picture is, and apparently also includes whether or not it has a green or purple tint to it. you've seen tons of pics like that - shots of camwhores in the bathroom that're totally yellow/orange to the point of looking unnatural. needless to say, that would be a "warm" white balance. correcting it is pretty easy though: it consists of moving a slider around until the skin tones look normal. of course, if the lights were actually orange and you wanted to replicate that, you'd have to leave it slightly warm.
technically, you could get it right in camera, by having a white card that you shoot, which tells the camera "this is what white looks like under these circumstances, adjust all other colours accordingly". but that's a hassle and there's no real point to doing that vs. just doing it afterwards; leaving the camera on auto and letting it make whatever mistakes it wants and then picking up after it usually works, though cameras are getting pretty good now anyways. in the vertical pictures above, you can see that the rocks in the first picture had a slightly purple tint to them. during post, i corrected them back to the neutral tones they had before.
-noise reduction - in JPEG, most of the time the camera does a lot of NR (noise reduction, if you didn't figure that out) automatically because the kind of people who'll shot JPEG aren't the kind of people to run a shot through Lightroom or Noise Ninja to reduce the noise. the thing is, in-camera NR is kinda shitty, and just smears the detail for a clean, noiseless image - at the price of having really mushed up detail. computer programs do the job much better and preserve much more detail, so it makes sense if you're gonna shoot RAW to do the job on a computer instead.
-sharpening - this phrase is a bit confusing. in absolute terms, it's not making the picture any sharper than it was before: it's not possible to put in detail that wasn't there in the first place (hence the need for sharp lenses). what sharpening does in post is make the details that are in the shot more prominent. bringing out the little details has about 0 effect on web-sized images; it's generally more for when you plan on printing a picture, which is more demanding on an image file than facebook.
and, a final thing (at least on "reporter" type shots, which are appealing on the principal that what you see is true. that is, a picture of a sunset is only amazing because it actually looked that amazing. i'll get into shots that were edited heavily, far beyond what the scene really looked like, in a little bit) about editing for RAW files. they are, by nature, less saturated, less contrasty, 100% of the time, than real life. and they're meant to be. this gives photographers the most leeway to be edited, moulded into how they want it to be: they are meant to be edited. repeat, they are files that are meant to be edited. JPEGs aren't because they're meant to just let the camera edit for you - if anything, that's worse because it's letting the camera processor decide what the picture looks like, not you. so, that's why you'll often hear that the only editing on a shot is the "usual curves" (basically a bump in contrast and such) - they're just taking control over the final image making.
so, to recap, editing photos is totally normal and justified because:
-cameras and lenses and technologies in general have shortcomings that will all leave their mark on an image, as opposed to leaving it faithful to what the eye sees
-retaining the most detail possible in shadows and details and restoring the colours is better than just leaving stuff burnt or washed out
-JPEGs let a program determine the look of an image. RAWs put that control back where it belongs - in the photographer's hands
-there are some factors that can be out of control of a photographer - accidents, equipment flaws, even a branch in the way of a shot that isn't possible to be moved at the time of the shot, that was later cloned out - that RAW can help aid.
bottom line - if being as accurate as possible to "being there" is the goal, using a RAW file and then editing the file is the way to go.
now, on the other side of things, if that ISN'T the goal then....what's the problem? i often do such edits, whether to emphasize a particular mood that maybe i was feeling at the time of the shot or that the scene evoked in me, or to isolate a subject, and so on. the list of reasons why such edits might be made are as endless as any photographer's artistic whims. here's some examples:
and it's not like that doesn't take skill either. i started off not knowing much about how to use editing to get what i wanted out of it, and i still don't know all that much, nor am i great with it, but i've improved a lot, and learned a few tricks.
which leaves us to the last point: when it's NOT okay to edit:
to deceive the viewer. that's about it, really, what it boils down to. if you're changing the colours around to make it match up with the colours that they looked like in life, there's nothing wrong with that. if you're changing the picture around to get across something, there's nothing wrong with that. if you're putting double rainbows in every picture you take and trying to pass it off as real, there's something wrong with that. and that's about it, really.
wow, this was a lot longer than i intentionally intended. oops.
No comments:
Post a Comment