Are Digital Photographers Afraid of the Darkroom?
Posted on 18 June 2010
Some professional photographers who have migrated to digital from film, somehow think that Photoshop modifications are “cheating” or make things “too easy.” These are the same people who really don’t have a big problem with shooters who spent a lot of time in the old chemical darkrooms. For the record, Ansel Adams spent quite a lot of time in the darkroom as a big part of his craft and nobody seems to balk.
Honestly, Photoshop (and Lightroom) are today’s new darkroom, and there’s nothing wrong with taking an image into Photoshop to improve it. There are only a few reasons people wouldn’t “Photoshop” their images…
- They’re intimidated by Photoshop (and/or Lightroom).
- They have strict guidelines about editing that limit their use of Photoshop (photo journalists, CSI techs, etc. following policies).
- They have some distorted sense of reality in which Photoshop is somehow cheating. They think that 100% of all image manipulation is done before or when the shutter clicks and anything after that is cheating.
Ironically, digital cameras do all kinds of image manipulation, and using lights, light modifiers, zooming in, changing your own position, choosing an aperture to control depth of field and motion, choosing a shutter speed to control ambient light and action, etc. are all elements of manipulation. Those just happen before or during the shutter click.
Sure, you can add people to an image who weren’t there originally. You can take people out of an image if you want. You can change a boring, cloudless sky to something interesting by combining two exposures. You can enhance colors. You can apply effects. You can blur parts of your image for artistic effects. And everything I’ve just mentioned can be done in a traditional darkroom. It’s just that the new technology of Photoshop makes these things much more available to many more people than traditional darkroom techniques did.
If Photoshop is cheating, there’s a whole lot of cheating going on
I guess that, to traditional typesetters and layout graphic artists, desktop publishing is cheating. To a quick print shop, a color laser printer or inkjet is cheating. Heck, to photo labs, your inkjet is cheating. Here’s a fun one: to an oil and canvas portrait artist, using a camera is cheating. To the paper map companies, a GPS is cheating. To the newspaper companies, news web sites are cheating. To a horse rider, a car is cheating.
Truth is, Photoshop is the continuation of photography technology. Most will embrace it to one degree or another and the rest will go the way of the horse and buggy.
By the way, one of the reasons I LOVE working at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) is because we focus on teaching people how to use Photoshop and our trainers try to keep people on the leading edge. Photoshop and photo manipulation are now in the hands of the masses and the best we can do is keep people up to speed about how to do all that they want to do with their images.
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10 responses to Are Digital Photographers Afraid of the Darkroom?
As someone who spent 20-some years in the darkroom as a Navy Photographer…dodging, burning, color correcting, spotting…trying to produce quality prints for his customers, I find that I spend just as much time working my images in Photoshop and Lightroom as I did in an actual darkroom. Both the conventional darkroom and the digital darkroom take knowledge, experience and skill. If you want to create outstanding images, you have to work at it. I got involved in digital photography in its infancy back in the late 80’s and Photoshop in the early 90s. A couple years ago, I added Lightroom to my repertoire. Even though I specialized in photographic process control, I relished the chance to learn digital photography and never looked back. I trained at Rochester Institute of Technology, and I still remember one of my professors saying, “digital photography is here to stay…either keep up with the technology or find another career”. Photography always has been, and will continue to be, an art and a science.
Is this still an arguing point to some?
From an artistic standpoint, creativity has no bounds. It is the final result that matters.
For images of a more realistic nature, there are limitations, of course, but these existed before the advent of digital. Integrity is your primary guide.
Photographers must not feel it necessary to impose artificial restrictions upon themselves. Photographers have choice. Strive to use the tools and techniques, old or new, in ways that produce the best image you possibly can.
The viewers have responsibility too. They must always remember that no matter how realistic an image may appear, it is still just a two-dimensional image, a powerful yet narrow representation of reality.
Just my humble opinion
Real darkroom photographers remember the true meaning of dodging, burning, and white balance, not something from a drop down menu. They also have tried to forget the coughing and why their lungs are impaired and their fingers smell and are discolored. We admit that living in front of an lcd screen is much better than the old days of squinting in the dark. Today the tools are better, and the pictures don’t take hours to produce watching a clock.
Learn to appreciate what you have!
So where does one go to start at the absolute beginning to Learn Photoshop/Lightroom. I am really confused as it seems there is always a new edition..Where is the Beginning? I really would like to know.
I found the best place was a site called lynda.com. Deke McClelland has a wonderful series called Photoshop one on one in which he educates you on every tool and command in the program,explaining in great detail how each one works and why. It is a pay site, but the cost is negligable and well worth the investment.
While Deke is certainly quite good, I’d strongly encourage you to look at KelbyTraining.com and sample their Lightroom classes. You can watch up to 3 sessions for free and content is sorted by topic (Lightroom) so you can get started fairly inexpensively. Then if you want to take the whole class (or multiple classes on Lightroom, Photoshop, photography, etc.) then it’s just $25 for an unlimited month ($19.95 for NAPP members).
[...] Larry Becker’s blog post on ‘cheating’ and photography – Larry makes some excellent points here on just what the process of editing images is. [...]
Larry, you didn’t mention that learning over at Kelbytraining.com is the ultimate cheating (do it daily)! I have started using Lightroom now more than ever and after watching Matt’s videos, well I may just get in trouble for cheating so much.
Larry, I’m reading Joe McNally’s “The moment it clicks”. I never here of Joe mentioning his post process work. Do you know if Joe is a big Photoshop guy? (Great book by the way)
Sure, Joe spends time in Photoshop and does include some of that in classes I’ve seen him teach, but that’s not what he’s known for.
It’s kind of like if Joe was one of the best race car drivers on the planet and everybody watches his work to see him drive and they take driving classes from him. Sure, he works under the hood from time to time, but that’s not what people know him for and that’s not what he really teaches.