Dave Stevenson
Any time you do this as a photographer, you’ll get speaking to people, and the questions you’re asked will follow a few variations on a few different themes. The question I get asked most, far and away, is whether I took all the shots I’m sitting in front of myself. In the age of using Google Images to find and use images, that’s not an unreasonable question. Just ask the Yorkshire-based organic vegetable grower that did precisely that on its blog and was promptly met with a charge of nearly £400 from Getty whose image it had taken. Image theft happens all the time and I’d be amazed if there weren’t unscrupulous types out there at art shows passing off other people’s work as their own.
The next popular questions involve which equipment I used to take my photos (whatever came to hand), and precisely where I was when I took particular shots.
I also get questions which stray into the field of ethics. I get asked, for instance, whether the animals in my shots are wild, which, in the framed prints I sell, they are. A while ago, though, I was asked a much more interesting question. The chap had been leafing through prints and, after what I’ve come to regard as standard questions about the benefits of Canon versus Nikon, he asked: ‘Have these been Photoshopped?’
Good one. Of course, they had. I use Lightroom for every single one of my shots. It’s how I organise my library and because I shoot in Raw all of my work is necessarily converted to Jpeg at some point. So even if I exercised the very lightest possible touch, it would still be impossible to say I hadn’t Photoshopped my work. If I didn’t do it, hardly anyone would be able to open my images on their computer, no commercial printer would touch them and you could certainly forget about popping them on Facebook.
It made me think of a talented photographer I once saw featured on a website. In the obligatory ‘About me’ section of his site lay a phrase explaining how his images were ‘not digitally manipulated’.
A bold claim, I thought, and one that, at least literally, was false. And the most cursory examination of a randomly picked image’s Exif data revealed that it had indeed gone through a version of Photoshop, raising the question of whether our star photographer was lying to his public.
It’s here that we begin to wade through areas so grey they make a rainy afternoon in Chester look like a weekend in St Tropez. My guess, you see, is that the friendly chap who asked me if my images were Photoshopped, and our anonymous photographer who claims his image are untouched, are using the terms ‘Photoshopped’ and ‘digitally manipulated’ as synonyms for ‘cheating’.
You know what I mean by this. Popping in bright blue, cloudless skies when grey rainclouds were present in the original image. Cloning out a zoo fence to make that priceless lion shot look like it was taken in the wild. Underhand, devious pieces of invisible editing that make your depictions of reality into pieces of faux art. This is serious stuff – not only are you deceiving your potential clients into thinking you’re a better or more adventurous photographer than you are, but your photos will never have editorial value if they only give the most passing nod to reality.
But what’s acceptable? Should we, for instance, stick to downloading our images, converting Raws to Jpegs without touching anything on them? (Ignoring, for a second, that all the Raw software I’ve ever used automatically makes small changes to images whether you ask for it or not.) Or perhaps we should force ourselves to only make the same edits we had available in the darkroom?
However, just think of what you’d be giving up. After-the-fact white balance alteration, for a start. This is my most frequently reached-for tool in Lightroom, not least because my DSLRs get white balance wrong in such a mind-bogglingly wide range of situations. Overcast day? Wrong white balance. Weird conference hall lighting? Wrong white balance. Subject in the wrong kind of shade? Wrong white balance. It’s weird. If you tried to rob me of the ability to colour correct my shots I’d chew your arm off before you succeeded.
Almost every other change you can make to an image is an equally confusing moral maze. Some lenses, for instance, recreate the original contrast in a scene so beautifully you barely need to touch the resultant images – the Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS II is the most recent lens I’ve used that fits that particular bill. The images I produced simply didn’t need more than the most basic and tiny amounts of colour correction before they were ready for print. Most other lenses recreate contrast less well, which means yet more colour correction to bring your image into line with what you originally saw. And how about sharpening? If your optics are less than perfect, your final image will be softer than the one you originally saw. The same goes for applying noise reduction. The point, which bears labouring, is you can do an awful lot to your image in software simply to end up with an image that’s actually closer to what was in front of the camera. I don’t use hard and fast rules, but I do believe a light touch is best.
Speaking as someone with a vested interest in producing trustworthy images, I think image editing is fine to a point. I think colour correction is fine, and I think adjusting contrast to make an image more accurate is par for the course. Dust spots, of course, weren’t there in the scene and should be invisibly removed. Still, if it’s editorial, I don’t think cloning out distracting elements is a very good idea, and I think colour correction should be applied to help get an image look more similar to how it was in reality, rather than being used to add unbelievable amounts of saturation to help it make a more striking first impression.
In the end, it’s all about trust. People need – want, actually – to trust your images, but once you give them a reason to doubt you, it will take forever to win back that trust.
