I've been pondering recently the joys of
photoshop. It can take a distinctly average photo and make it rather wonderful. But does that mean that there's no skill in photography any more?
Photoshop 1.0 was officially released in 1990. It's been around for sometime! And since then newer versions have (thankfully been released (although even if you gave me the very first version of photoshop I probably wouldn't know how to utilise all of the features it had!)). CS4 is the most recent release and is the 11th major version of the program. (Yes all this info is coming from wikipedia!)
It's important to note however that even before photoshop (and digital photography) came about genii in the darkroom were slaving away doing very similar sorts of things as photoshop does now. Techniques such as exposure control, dodging and burning (making certain parts of images lighter or darker) and colour correction. Considering there huge wide spread use of digital photography instead of film photography (almost everyone has a point and shoot camera or at least one on their phone!) photoshop gives them the opportunity to do the things they would have done in the dark room if they developed their own photos. I say this with a sense of (I'm not sure irony is the right word but I'll use it anyway) irony considering it costs just short of £630!
So photoshop methods are not new! Airbrushing has been done for years!
A number of years ago I skimped an ancient version of photoshop (6.0) and my delightful brother taught me the basics. Colour correction, levels, curves, and most usefully layers! This taught me different ways of manipulating images to get them to look how I want.
I thought I would let you (very few) readers into some of the secrets that I use in photoshop. I almost feel like I'm breaking the magic code about telling people how it's done but I want people to understand that my opinion is that there is both a huge skill in taking a nice photo. There is also huge skill in doing things with photoshop (neither of which I have to any great lengths) but put them together and you have a killer combination with some awesome (in some people cases) results.
So example number one.
I "took" this photo at while before Christmas when it snowed at uni.
This photo is actually a combination of two photos:
What you can probably see already is that I've taken the top from the second picture and "overlayed" it on the bottom from the first picture. If you're feeling especially observant you'll notice that the tree on the left of both original photos has been "trimmed" in the final image. This is because it was particularly challenging to "paint" (with a layer - if people care about layers I can chat about them in another blog post) around the branches to get the dark sky to show up only behind the tree so it was easier to remove it altogether. Now there is a way of doing this purely using the camera and that's by using something called a graduated filter. This is a filter you physically put in front of the lens that is darker at the top than at the bottom. So in effect you get a dark sky and a normal ground. But I didn't have one so I did it in photoshop on my own. Does this mean that the final image isn't a good photo? No I don't think so (please forgive my apparent boasting, I don't mean to I just need to explain the difference between what in my opinion is a good photo and what isn't!) But I knew I could get a good photo out of an average photo so I exposed twice (at least!) and was able to create the final image.
Example no 2
This is the "world famous!" (Ha!) BBC News photo, again taken in the snow, of my delightful girlfriends home. Again very similar principle to last time of having a darkened sky and a normal foreground. I only took one photo here because I knew there was detail still in the sky:
Actually this is a cheat... This isn't the original at all... This is:
In case you're distressingly unobservant the difference is the footsteps in the snow! My girlfriends mother (understandably!) needed to get to her greenhouse at the bottom of her garden and so walked through the snow. But no fear! The "clone stamp tool" is to hand! This effectively takes an area you choose and clones it where you want which works great with snow!!
I then darkened the exposure (kinda) so the sky became dark:
But thought the whole thing looked a little dark and so lightened up the lot to get the final image:
Again I could have used a graduated filter had I had one, but sadly I didn't.
My final example is a portrait shoot. Many of you know I did my first studio shoot last week which I really enjoyed. I had great fun experimenting with studio strobes and getting lighting right. The shot I shall explain is this one:
This is a shot from my shoot with Hannah. I like it. However it didn't always look like this!
The original photo was:
The original is still a nice picture but not quite as nice. As you can see there are a few spots on the chin and at the top of the nose, as well as some dry skin around the mouth. I'll let you find any others if you care. So the first step was doing that. The wonders of the "clone stamp tool" (again) and the spot heal tool. Here's what it looked like after those had been removed:
The next thought I had was with beauty shots (which is what I imagined this to be when I shot it) there is a lack of definition/faint blurring of the skin. This is the airbrushed look that everyone sees in magazines! So I won't tell you how I did that because I've already told one person this month and we can't have it getting out now can we!
However this is what it looked like after the skin blurring:
You can see that any bits I missed originally have now been nicely smoothed out and the skin just looks softer.
The only thing left to do was the eye colour. Hannah has lovely brown eyes but I thought they needed filling out (colour wise) a bit. And so the final image was created:
I loved doing the photoshoot I really did, but I also loved doing the photoshopping! (not shopping for photos!) I loved seeing a good photo (in my opinion) become great (in my opinion!).
I'm not going to lie I also love natural untouched shots, and I do use them. But it all depends on what the medium is. I wanted this shoot to be a beauty shoot. Like magazines. This is the sad (in a way) truth. Every single photo you see of a model in any beauty/fashion magazine has been photoshopped to one degree or another. I can guarantee it. I was speaking to a friend a while ago about photoshopping and she said "I want to look like the photoshopped people without being photoshopped!" But even the photoshopped people don't actually look like the photoshopped people! There is a strong argument for photoshopped models being part of the cause of low self esteem in teenage girls (and adult girls!) because they strive towards a body that's only created digitally! You can shrink things, enlarge things, make things disappear etc. It's an unrealistic physical goal to set. However the power of photoshop can also be something to be embraced. It allows more creative freedom to really create the images you wanted to create!
However the start is in the camera. You can't make something out of nothing. (Well actually in photoshop that's not entirely true). This I made out of nothing a couple of nights ago and it's not too bad. Not great either though:
But when editing photos the happier you are with what you have in camera, the less you have to do in photoshop. A good example of this is the photo I shared ages ago:
Final
Original
This guy (Blair Bunting) has got it to a t (tee? tea?) well he's got it to a fine art! He knew what he was aiming for and he only had to do a little photoshop work to get it done. (He did have 11 different light sources and got a GREAT result from every one of them!!)
I would genuinely love to know what you think about photoshop and photoshopped photos. I like what photoshop can do, and I only hope my skills will keep growing when it comes to using it (the genuis of youtube tutorials!)
Done for now.
