Too much Photoshop? I judged myself.

It is a case of ‘photoshopping‘ which i want to talk about today. Actually it is much more a story about how normal digital editing routines can be misunderstood as photoshopping.

Klavs Bo Christensen, a Danish photographer was nominated the Picture of the Year Denmark price was actually dismissed because of the use of photoshop (The original article about this case with example pictures). First of all, he did not photoshop in the classical sense since no parts of the pictures were altered or manipulated. Instead, he used the functions of the raw converter excessively. Which difference does this make? A big one, in my opinion.

Raw converters are software which turn the unprocessed information of the camera sensor in actual pictures. To explain things a bit, a raw image is no image in the literal sense at all since it does not ‘look’. Instead it is the 1:1 information delivered from the sensor of the camera and converted into digital information by the A/D converter and image processor of the camera. Only the raw converter (either the in-camera converter if the camera outputs jpgs or a standalone software) turns the physical information of optical/electrical charge for each sensor pixel into a picture.

Why do i write all of this? Well, it is very important to understand what a digital pictures is and why it looks how it looks. But back to the case of Klavs. He shot raw pictures and developed them himself. He boosted contrast and saturation. He did not altered the content but changed the way the content looks. That’s the point: Changing the content is manipulation. Changing the way the content looks is not manipulation.

At least that is what was the rule for the first century of documentary photography. The usage of black and white film is a good example: There are few changes to the look of a picture that a more drastic than removing all color information. Or think of the usage of film with extended sensitivity in the IR spectrum. Or cross-processing, just to name few radical methods of 35mm photography.

Particularly, Klavs was criticized for using Photoshop (to just process his raws). However, changing few in-camera-settings give very similar results just out of the camera:

These pictures where shot as jpgs with my Canon 5D with different picture style, contrast and saturation settings. Nothing else. There’s no Photoshop necessary to be most likely dismissed for the Danish PoY.

Imho, the widespread Photoshop-paranoia is dangerous. Digital photography is great because it gives power to the photographer which was held by film producers, labs, and printers before. There’s only one small disclaimer: wire agency such as Getty or Reuters are not interested in photographers with a great individualistic editing style. They want pictures with the style of the agency in the foreground, not of the photographer. Hence the very rigid limitations these companies give.