Grinding my Gears

Awhile ago, a friend indicated  that either a local photo contest or some local agency was looking for some town photos — but not photoshopped! I don't know what that means, and I doubt whether the organizer knew what it means. I must confess that the lack of knowledge and clarity about photography and photoshop causes me to grind my gears.

What was not photoshopped supposed to have meant?

Did it mean SOOC (straight out of the camera) with no editing at all? Or maybe it meant no adding or subtracting of objects? It's not clear.

What people fail to understand, is that every image is processed. Most people don't edit their photos in post, but that doesn't mean that they're not developed. What it does mean is that they have chosen to let the software in the camera process their images. The camera will make decisions about light balance, colour, saturation, and sharpness. It isn't reality; it is the camera's subjective interpretation of the subject.

If you shoot with a phone, you are often getting a highly processed version of reality. For example, compare my photo of a cadet at the Remembrance Vigil with the version from Sue's phone.

I worked hard both in camera and in edit to get this photo. It is a fair approximation of the dark ambience.

This is how Sue's phone interpreted the scene. It lightened the photo well beyond the conditions as they were, for it was really a pretty dark scene.

It is an splendid result for sure, but it isn't what we saw. In this case, SOOC really augmented reality. I am impressed with the phone's software capabilities. It is truly remarkable. But it exemplifies how much processing a phone can and will do, all on its own. In point of fact, it is a lot more impressive than my version, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the situation. My photo, which was photoshopped (by that I mean edited) is truer to reality.

Phones are most definitively impressive. I recently showed this photo.

It took me quite a lot of work to get that photo. I had to take three images on a tripod to capture the full range of light. Then, I had to blend them together in Photoshop, after which there were a few additional adjustments to be made.

Meanwhile, Sue was able to handhold her phone for a length of time that would have cause my camera to produce a blurry photo, but hers is sharp. The phone took a single photo, saw that there was a huge tonal range and processed the scene accordingly. It is really pretty amazing.

Both version rely on software and computing power. Mine took a lot more steps, but the phone's software is so powerful, that it did it all effortlessly and arguably produced a cleaner image even though it was handheld.

As I have already written, it is very impressive. But nobody had better @ me about photoshop, and mustn't presume that a supposedly unedited SOOC photo is necessarily true to reality.

Addendum; Just to clarify, I have Photoshop, but I don't always use it much. Of course, I do edit photos, but mostly in Photoshop's companion program, Lightroom. In general conversation, as in much of this post, I'll use the word photoshop, just to mean editing.