Dave Stevenson
The whole point of digital images is that they can be improved with post-processing, but over-manipulate them and you’ll risk becoming clichéd.
I wrote a column a couple of months ago along the lines of the death of Photoshop. In it, I suggested that for many professionals, the days of a per-pixel photo editor were over. Instead, an application handling your entire workflow, from import to generation of the final Tiff, was more valuable. Lightroom and Aperture both follow these rules, both are great, and most of the time I don’t wish for anything more.
Then I saw an online gallery and I began to hate the idea of using any image editor for anything, ever again. I don’t remember exactly what the gallery was called or, fortunately for MacUser’s lawyers, who created it. The main thrust of it was that it was a portfolio of pictures, and their common feature was that they all looked terrible. The pictures themselves were probably fine out of the camera, but the workflow applied went vaguely along the lines of: ‘Ooh yeah groovy mate set curves to maximum, here’s a nice big vignette effect, nononono make it bigger, yeah more dramatic, BURN THE COLOURS.’ It was like having a can of red powder paint poured straight into your retinas.
You’ve seen these. If you’re anything like me, you’ve made some of them as well. I call it, and you should apply this with a dollop of scepticism, the Flickr effect. It’s a style that has come about largely because of the difference between looking at a picture on a print and looking at one on screen. Printed out, nicely lit and mounted, a decent picture doesn’t need much help to look good. Left to its own devices, a DSLR produces fairly flat-looking images, so check the white balance, pull the curves a bit to increase its contrast and you’re there.
On screen, photography works fundamentally differently than it does in print. Making an image stand out on screen requires bolder, brighter colours. My experience is that vignettes work better; photos rarely occupy the whole screen and are often surrounded by an irregular amount of white space, so having something to lead in the eye simply works. There’s also the problem that people idly browsing the Internet have the same attention span as Paris Hilton reading a Haynes manual, so images need to be punchier to hold their attention. This style even gets a look-in in Lightroom’s built-in picture styles: it’s called Direct Positive. Indeed, the art of over-punching colour has even led to a resurgence (of sorts) in film photography, which is why you can buy lomography cameras for £45 from chic geek hangout Urban Outfitters.
(To which we say: forty-five quid? Another 20 notes will get you a decent digital camera, whose pictures can be adjusted to virtually any style after the fact. Buying a lomography camera is like buying a camera that can only shoot monochrome.)
It’s not that it doesn’t work: bold colours and lead-in techniques are effective when it comes to grabbing your attention, and it’s not surprising that the growth of a new medium for publishing photos has led to new styles.
The problem is that being able to make your photos look like they’ve been irradiated doesn’t automatically make them much more interesting. Putting John Major in a sequinned ball gown might make him more diverting for an afternoon, but if all MPs were dressed that way, we’d still watch Boris Johnson.
Careful editing might be able to make a good picture better, but it isn’t a catch-all. If you take boring photos, no amount of knob-twiddling will save them. As with any post-processing technique, from monochrome conversions to infrared-style landscapes, you need to be selective about how you use it. If you’re aggressively skewing contrast in your pictures and burning the colours, vintage-style subjects work well, while overly punchy reportage shots and landscapes are overwrought and exhausting to look at.
I occasionally toy with the idea of spending a few days without any editing software. It’s not a totally pointless exercise: knowing that you won’t get a chance to edit a shot makes you more careful when it comes to key jobs such as metering and composition, while not being able to change the contrast should put you in the hunt for bolder, more interesting colours. That’s an appealing idea for occasional photographers, who want nothing more than decent-looking images out of their cameras, and it’s part of the reason that modern compacts come with a kitchen sink’s worth of presets.
There are two problems with this. The first is that, for me, editing images is part of the process. I’m not sure I’ve spent a more satisfying rainy Sunday afternoon than the one I had recently editing a thousand images from a recent trip to India down to a manageable selection of the very best. You are, at this point, allowed to cough the word ‘nerd’ politely into your hand.
The other problem is the digital images – Raw files in particular – are supposed to be edited. For one thing, DSLRs tend to under-expose, so if you play things safe and obey the camera’s metering, you’ll end up with images that need at least an extra stop of exposure. It’s also a rare environment that can provoke a camera to produce 100% accurate white balance, something that’s easy to fix in software but verboten under our proposed Photoshop-free regime. And if you’re shooting Raws, post-processing is a downright necessity. The Nikon D3s, which ‘only’ has 12.1 megapixels, produces Raw files in the region of 15MB. Higher-res cameras such as the Canon 550D produce Raw files of at least 25MB, and best-quality Jpegs aren’t exactly welterweights either.
The idea that sites such as Flickr or deviantART could exist without DSLR users processing their shots to produce compressed, portable Jpegs is pretty laughable. And the whole point of shooting Raw files is that they provide an amazing amount of editing latitude, from instant white-balance correction to being able to salvage detail from very dark shadow. They, like all digital photography, are supposed to be processed. It’s how images are processed that presents a problem: lomography-style photography is a cliché, and like all clichés, people skip it whenever they see it.
