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Most photographers agree that ‘global edits’ — i.e., edits that are applied to your entire photograph at once, such as white-balance corrections; saturation adjustments; black-and-white conversions, and sharpening — are here to stay. Spot-editing, however — i.e., edits that are applied to only a small portion of your photo — tends to be a whole other ball game, with photographers arguing out the ethics day-and-night. There are three general views which you should learn about:
Never spot-edit your photographs. If you know what you’re doing as a photographer, you really shouldn’t need to. If you’re having to remove a sweetie wrapper from the ground in one of your photographs, it means you made a mistake earlier on in the process: you should have picked it up before you took the photo.
Similarly, if you’re removing a sign from a wall, or a blemish from someone’s skin, your photos are no longer photographs: they don’t show the world as it is, but rather what you, the photographer, have turned it into. It’s a slippery slope: as soon as I remove anything from a photo, it makes me a liar, and I don’t want to be one; so no spot-editing for me. Ever.
Keeping it Real: No editing beyond a crop and a bit of a color tweak.
My goal as a photographer is to achieve what could have been, not the way it necessarily was on the particular day you took your photos. We’re looking for the spirit of a particular scene, rather than the particulars.
Picking up sweet-wrappers is lovely and all, but since it isn’t a permanent feature of the scene, why bother, when I can fix it in post-processing? If I had taken the photo a day before or a day later, the wrapper wouldn’t be there. Perhaps editing it out would be a white lie, but so be it, it’s a plausible lie.
The same applies to editing photos of people: I might have taken a portrait photo of somebody, but on the day I did the shoot, my model had a small scratch on her cheek after a minor disagreement with a kitten. The cut will heal over time, so editing out the scratch in post-production would be similar to magic-ing away the candy-wrapper: it isn’t a permanent feature of the person’s face, so I’m happy to remove it.
If that very same model had moles, scars, birth-marks, freckles, wrinkles or other permanent features, I’d leave them. Removing them would be akin to removing a fence-post from a landscape photo: it’s not a wrapper that would have blown away by itself over time.
Going Moderate: Editing only non-permanent features of the model’s face
Not editing your photos? Have you lost your marbles? If Rolling Stone magazine can do it, so can I!
Look, my goal as a photographer is really simple: I want to create the most beautiful photographs I can, with all the tools you have available in my arsenal.
‘Truth’ be damned: landscapes and people look better when they have been retouched to look perfect, and the photos you’re taking aren’t the final result. Quite the opposite: photos are the raw-materials, much like the way a painter would see paints. The digital files coming out of a camera are merely the starting points for further editing. If you have a photo with a beautiful sky, another with a beautiful foreground, and a third where your model’s arm looks a little bit better than in your original foreground, then so be it, far-well accuracy, hello franken-photo.
Ultimately, the only thing that matters is the print that goes on the wall. You’re an artist, dammit, not an archivist.
Balls to the wall: If I can edit it, I will – with gorgeous results. Isn’t that what photography is about? Results?
What do you think? Is it ethical to edit your photos? If so, to what degree?
The full-resolution, un-edited version of the photo is available here — why not show us how far you’d go with your edits, and link to your version in the comments?
Photo Credit: Haje Jan Kamps
Haje Jan Kamps is a prolific photography blogger who has written a small stack of books about photography. He also developed the recently-launched Triggertrap camera trigger and has been known to travel the world a bit. If you’re of the tweeting kind, try him on @Photocritic!
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Great article. Depending on the image, I will tweak a bit.. Maybe turn colour to B&W. I will spot edit if there is a mark on the scan/negative that is noticeable. I don’t think I’d go ‘balls to the wall’.
Which reminds me of this Fotoshop video: http://vimeo.com/34813864
Haha – nice clip.
Yeah, I’m pretty much the same, moderate editing. I rarely remove things that were in the picture, but might use a brush to darken the sky, highlight the foreground, etc.
I feel that you probably should make the effort to remove sweetie wrappers and get good at make-up (if that’s your thing) before you shop stuff out, but we’re all learning and in the process of learning, you’ll want to make your images look as good as they can without being obtusely strict.
Also, there is a line with photo-journalism. Something like the Katy P Rolling Stone cover is fair game, it’s not meant to be a depiction of real life, it’s a magazine cover. My goal as an amateur is rarely to represent real life – my interests are primarily landscape, nature and travel – in all three of those genres, my aim is to make the scene as striking or dramatic as I can. It’s supposed to represent a real event or place but in the optimum conditions, which you can rarely control.
I once sent a photo into the Beeb for a news story, they used it – but I was conscious not to make anything other than the barest minimum global tweaks.
I almost never brush skin, unless it’s my own, cos I is vain, innit.
“my interests are primarily landscape, nature and travel – in all three of those genres, my aim is to make the scene as striking or dramatic as I can”
So one of your interest is nature and you aim to make it unnatural in appearance by editting the photos?
Personally I don’t really see the point of editting. I dislike excessive posing in my photographs and would rather have things as the are. To me the ‘free-for-all’ example looks horrific just like people who wear too much make-up – if you can see it, you have too much on – if you see the photoshop, you have done too much.
“So one of your interest is nature and you aim to make it unnatural in appearance by editting the photos? ”
No, I also used stuffed animals. They’re much easier to work with and don’t mind explosions.
Call me stupid (I probably am) but I’m just too damn lazy to edit my photos.
If I wouldn’t be I’d probably go with the moderate view.
The article misses the point of post processing a photograph (a process that predates digital photography) Vs image manipulation to convey a specific message.
An image like the last one can be easily reproduced without image manipulation. Just a good make up artist and good lighting setup. Which is partly why the article misses the point.
I could not agree more with your comment. Well said.
oh yeah, it misses the point that everyone’s got a mini-makeup artist in their pocket for these very occasions
I generally do Global edits to my photos, initially to correct or tweak exposure and colour. If there are large areas of different light levels, such as a sky or ground or body of water, i will region them and many tweaks specfic to those areas. Then i will usually modify the colours global, i like my photos to have a tonality to them, i feel it gives them personality. My goal is not necessarily to be as faithful as possible to the original photograph, but more that i am trying to stay faithful to my own memory of that moment. My eyes can see better than my camera would capture and my memory distorts colours because of my mood at that moment.
I think so long as one doesn’t blatantly try and pretend an image is natural when it isn’t, its ok. Whilst its true, as my skills have progressed, i have had to do less primary correction, i still choose to do some level of post production on my photographs because my goal stays the same.
When it comes to my own shots, extensive post production never really saves a bad photograph, so I don’t necessarily equate the amount of post production someone might need to do as a benchmark for their skills as a photographer.
I think it comes down to your own tastes and your own goals.
Personally I believe that anything you can do in the darkroom with traditional film when processing an image is perfectly acceptable in digital processing. There is no “ultimate Truth” in photography, as everything will have some form of bias to it. If you shoot film your choice of film media, paper choice, developing process and even the lighting conditions under which the final print is viewed will affect how the image appears to the end viewer. Throw in choice of framing the shot when taking the picture, choosing exposure levels, white balance (or filter) staging of the shot or choosing the time to trigger the shutter, choosing shutter speed and the lighting at the time of the shoot are all conscious, biased decisions made by the photographer. How is that any different to making these decisions in post processing?
The debate centers on who made the image, doesn’t it? A photojournalist is held to different standards than a person manipulating images to evoke a response from a person viewing the work.
As a part-time photographer I try to use as little as possible in terms of photo manipulation, the greatest compliment being if I don’t really need to touch the photos afterwards.
If I do need to edit, I do it in a way that masks what I’ve actually done.
Though I have to admit, “balls to the wall” can be fun to do the first few times, but as with taking great pictures, I find experimentation is a great teacher.
For me i would say that i probably fit somewhere between the first and second category. I really like the technical side of thing and the challenge of getting the image right on camera, having to wait for the weather to be right to photograph the landscape i want to capture because i feel that ultimately the better you get it on camera the better the overall result will be.
Having said that i will generally go thorough the basic global edits, levels, brightness/contrast ect will most of my images, i very rarely spot edit.
One of the big problems that i can see with the digital editing and how easy it is (especially among ammeter photographers) is that unless people have taken time to learn the technical side of taking photos, or had formal education in it and make an effort to apply it in there work it results in lots of lazy photographers taking technically bad photos relying on there editing skills to make things look good rather than actually knowing how to take good images.
In the magazines and fashion industry i strongly feel that photo editing is used way to heavily, i am definitely a supporter of the dove real beauty campaign and what they are trying to promote.
Very true. I’m new(ish) to digital photography, having been a film zealot and darkroom person. One of the things that helped convert me (and I’m not a total convert) was seeing what you can do with RAW.
I recently got back from Borneo with around 2000 images, I eventually edited that down to just under 100 that I really liked. I reckon if I had been using film, I wouldn’t have shot 2000 images for starters and the recovery rate would’ve been lower.
I have to say that i started with digital really, but having just finished a degree in photography and spent my final year exclusively shooting film i can really sat that it completely changes your approach to photography.
i found that film very much forces you to get the technical side right, spending that extra time setting stuff up, and i have to say that i doing so despite taking less photos i am getting a lot more photos that are usable.
For anyone wanting to really get good at photography all i can say is grab yourself a medium format camera and a light meter, (u can get them second hand cheaper than your digital camera) and get good with it. you will learn a lot and your hit rate will get much better and u can then apply it to digital photography, giving u less photo editing to do, so more time to take photos.
The strict view.
I edit some photos, I don’t edit others. But every great photographer edits photos in both a real and unreal sense, in a real sense any person in a dark room would burn in or bleach a photo to make it work during exposure. In a unreal sense all photos are a fake edit of reality, why take the photo of the thing you are photographing and not the thing behind you, you are imposing an edit on reality, that’s why, why exposure at those settings, because you are editing reality again – photography is faking an image that you want to mirror your viewpoint.
It is good to limit yourself at times as an artist, but art has no rules, and anyone trying to impose rules is just trying to sell something – want is Mr. Kamps selling.
Generally I am a moderate, however in my line of work I deal with product photos. Here I go ‘balls to the wall’, everything has to be perfect, even if it’s not.
http://tinyurl.com/74wuuq3
Why does the un-edited version have no exif info and who is the girl ?
I’m fairly new to photography, but I think if you’re using components of photos to make an image (ie fantasy etc) then free for all is fine, as the audience knows full well that they’re looking at art. The photos are literally just tools to a final goal. If however you’re warping the minds of young people by being published in beauty mags etc then you shouldn’t create the image of unatainable perfection. You as the artist/photographer have certain moral obligations, then in the middle there’s small touch ups,black and white, HDR, etc just to please the viewer (personal potraits or whatever).
Some photographers just love to get that one shot were all the work was done pre-shutter, it’s a great feeling looking at your photo and thinking “yay! I got it right and it looks good”.
Don’t forget sometimes a simple crop can completely change the meaning of a photo and can and has been used to lie. Proffesionals should think of their audience and act/edit accordingly.
Everyone else; have fun, edit or not to your hearts content, and never forget that you’re a creative spirit, and photography edited or not is one of your outlets.
Man! Not this hoary old chestnut again. Shooters have been manipulating their work since the dark room. Just less messy these days. Now let the arguments begin…