Philosophy of processing photographs.

When people look at my photographs I am often asked :-

• Is that what it really looked like?
• Have you manipulated your photos?
• Did you do something in “Photoshop”?
• Did you post process the photograph?
• What camera did you use, I can’t get pictures like that with my camera?

Now lets be crystal clear about this. All digital photos are post processed in some way. If you take a picture in .jpg format your cameras “Picture Style” setting will do a number of things. It will take the raw image as interpreted by the sensor and apply sharpening, saturation, contrast and colour tone. (This is for Canon DSLR – others may vary slightly or use different terminology).

For instance my Canon 7D has 9 “Picture Styles”

• Standard
• Portrait
• Landscape
• Neutral
• Faithful
• Monochrome

Plus the ability to set 3 user defined “Picture Styles”.  Each of these “Picture Styles” can have a different setting for sharpening, saturation, contrast and colour tone.

Even if you take a photo in “RAW” (on Canon CR2, or Nikon NEF) and load the file into a RAW converter with no settings, I have found that different RAW converters seem to interpret the raw photo a little differently.  From my experience it would be rare that a RAW photo would not need some tweaking. For those new to RAW, a RAW photo is supposedly the data as the sensor has interpreted the scene with no in camera processing and may vary from camera to camera, sensor to sensor.

Lets not think for one minute that anything has changed since film photography.  I would suggest there were never any photographs from top photographers (or any photographer, for that matter) that were not “post processed”. Consider if you will, high contrast print papers, colour saturation of Kodachrome slides V Ektachrome V colour prints.  Consider also the differences in colours from different photo labs.  Various comments would be heard as people looked at their treasured photos. “The reds aren’t right”, “the oranges are off”, “the colours are drab”.  Other techniques in film days were “dodge” and “burn”, “unsharp mask”, “push process” and so on.

So if we accept that all photos are “post processed” in some way, then what should the intention be for the final photo.

To start with, lets take landscape photos and in particular a sunset/sunrise over a still body of water. eg

 When you watch a sunrise like this (Coongie Lake) there are a number of things that are tantalising the senses.  The birds are starting to stir and sing, the air temperature is cool but the air is perfectly still and you are taken over by a sense of vastness, solitude and serenity.  All of these things contribute to how you remember the scene when you sit at your computer to process the photo.  So as a photographer you want the viewer to see the image as you remember it, albeit a memory that has been influenced by a number of other factors.

But almost as importantly as that, it is a waste of time displaying/publishing a photo that doesn’t grab the attention of the viewer in some way.  So if the composition is OK, and the subject matter on topic, then some enhancement is not to be frowned upon.  A persons opinion of a photograph is personal and subjective, and if the viewer feels that it has been over processed then that is fine, but always bear in mind, that when you spend as much time in the outback as we do, we see some incredible colours and scenes.  Do not assume that the photo that has caught your attention has been heavily processed, because in all likely hood it has not.

In the photo above, that is precisely how I remember Coongie Lake on that beautiful morning.