Image Editing

There are two schools of image editing - those who want to make it easy as possible, and others like myself who care only about the result and how much work it take to get there is irrelevant. For professional photographers who have to process hundreds of images at a time, it simply isn't practical to spend 1 - 3 hours editing a single image. For those of us making fine art images however, a few hours to produce a portfolio quality image is nothing.

A more important issue is whether there is even a need for much manipulation. My background is in black and white photography in a wet darkroom in the Ansel Adams, Fred Picker tradition. Every image needed some work, even if it was nothing more than darkening edges but it didn't take long for me to start altering almost every image to some degree and some radically. After all there is no responsibility in black and white to maintain tones the same as in the original scene and if you could make things better, why wouldn't you?

When I went to inkjet printing of my black and white images, it seemed perfectly natural to take advantage of the powerful editing tools available via computer, in my case with Photoshop. I could now manipulate both further and more accurately and in smaller areas and more areas than ever before.

It was a natural extension to continue these techniques when I started working in colour and it didn't even occur to me that I should have any loyalty to the original colour as recorded.

This is radically different from colour slide photographers (whatever the format) who have very strong ideas of maintaining colour fidelity and go to great lengths to do so. When these people switch to the digital darkroom, they tend to make global changes (as if they were filtering in the camera) and that's about all. For people like this applications like Lightroom are all they need. For people who manipulate a few specific areas of an image, selecting those areas and adjusting them with Lightzone.

Those of us who have no loyalty to the original scene, thinking of it only in terms of fodder for our art work tend to prefer to use Photoshop and it's powerful ways of manipulating an image.

In the end it's not a matter of who's right or wrong, it has more to do with a philosophy of the image's relationship to reality.