There will always be post-processing, and people will edit their photos however they want. Some people will make a lot of changes, while others will barely touch them. I think it’s always been like this, hasn’t it?
jwpstl wrote:
Film images are faked just as much as digital. Ever seen an Ansel Adams negative? Looks nothing like the final print.
That's not really true, most people who took images on film didn't "fake" them, the images were printed straight and that was that, maybe with a little cropping. Only a small number of people out of all the people who used film cameras bothered to work on making significant changes to the images apart from basic color and exposure adjustment which often was automated. Of photographers using slide film, even smaller number of them did any post work on them, the images were viewed using a projector or light table, and that was that. Now, printing houses and labs did do things to make the printing of images from slide film manageable, but that didn't really typically include removing objects or adding objects to those images.
Digital is a whole different thing, in how it makes it easier to make substantial changes to the images, and this editing has become much more commonplace.
MattzDev wrote:
There will always be post-processing, and people will edit their photos however they want. Some people will make a lot of changes, while others will barely touch them. I think it’s always been like this, hasn’t it?
Not really, let's use nature photography as an example. It's typical that nature photos were shot on slide film and people typically projected them to show to an audience or viewed on a light table to select the images. The processing of the film was standardized as well as possible and no images received differential processing from another image, at least not on purpose (except sheet film whose processing could be adjusted on a single image basis but few did that in practice). People submitted those images to competitions and the audiences were shown projected images without any changes made to them, and prints were made by labs to mimic the images on the film as well as possible, without removing or adding objects, or other special treatment. Sometimes contrast masks were used in order to mitigate the problem of excessive contrast, and when printing the images, some work was done to make the printing possible, but they always had the reference in the slide that they could compare to, and try to match them as well as possible.
Those who photographed people outside of controlled lighting conditions often used either color or black and white negative film, and this was what most consumers also used. The images were either printed by hand in a darkroom (mostly black and white) and people were typically happy to see the images correctly exposed and outside of professionals, didn't do much work in the home darkroom on them apart from trying to get a sharp and correctly exposed print. That was that. With color negative film used by consumers, mostly they were printed by labs and while the machine made some adjustments to expose the print and adjust the color, this was done mostly by automated algorithms which didn't seek to add or remove anything from the images, simply to produce a technically decent print of the negative was the goal of the designers of the machine and their operators. This is how most people experienced photography. As for professional photographers, as more time could be put into a single image, there could be some work that is done to the image in the darkroom, but this was time-consuming and difficult and more obvious to spot if poorly done, and so the photograph had some power to show things that happened in the world, for the most part it was used for this purpose, and exceptions were not that common.
This is totally different from what is being done with digital photography today.
Yes, there is Ansel Adams who did more work on the images in the darkroom but due to the difficulty and time-consuming nature of this work, most people never bothered with it and so photographs had some power to show what happened, rather than what someone could imagine and create only in the virtual world.
RustyBug wrote:
The main difference is that skill level required to do this has become quite available to the average person via software tools / AI / etc.
I recall nearly 40 years ago, watching a retoucher friend of my dad show me how he did it for Playboy, et al. Back then it was a very small, very skilled discipline, that took years of training to develop a mastery of it. Now ... it's a one-click proposition to varying degrees. The fact that painters would "represent" people in a "flattering" manner ... has been around for longer than photography.
So, your point regarding its prevalence is of some validity, that it has reached into a realm of commonplace ... but the "NEWS FLASH" aspect of it ... Yawn, Meh.
Nevertheless, there was a lengthy period where most people's experience of photography and most people's practice of it was relatively straightforward 2D projection of 3D world moments and this is still a substantial part of how we remember photography in the film era. Photojournalists are still expected to maintain similar standards that the editing is not more than what one would typically do in a darkroom with simple steps. And I think most hobby photographers can't be bothered to make substantial changes to the images that they captured, even if they could, it's just not what they're interested in, or have the time to do. I'm not talking about instagram where things are different and edited images are common, but people who just do photography for themselves, to remember things that they saw in the real world, and to enjoy those moments in some way through the photographic memory.
What’s the difference between a photographer in 1926 spending an hour burning/dodging and making other print adjustments, in their darkroom; vs one of us being on a desktop using Adobe, or other good software, to make adjustments to the images we have taken?
At the end of a day, not much. So really no photographer is faking it today any more than a photographer was 100 years ago.
The difference is that today we can do it easier, faster, and more accurately. We have the options of making the final image look more realistic than what the image sensor captured, or do the opposite and make it look like a painting or any other unrealistic rendition.
Even when I was studying photography at college, many years ago, we were taught to manipulate images. We were mainly working with black and white negatives, but we were taught to dodge and burn, use different contrast grades of paper, and even swap out skies. Nowadays, AI makes things so much easier.
As a professional photographer, I see these AI tools as a double edged sword. For me, they help in my workflow, without destroying the core image. On the other side of the sword, I can see AI being abused by people, to the point that others really question the whole of the image presented to them.
picture: (n.) 1. a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface; “they showed us the pictures of their wedding”; image; icon; ikon; 2. graphic art consisting of an artistic composition made by applying paints to a surface; “his pictures hang in the Louvre”; painting; 3. a clear and telling mental image; “he described his mental picture of his assailant”; “he had no clear picture of himself or his world”; mental picture; impression; 4. a situation treated as an observable object; “the political picture is favorable”; scene; 5. illustrations used to decorate or explain a text; “the dictionary had many pictures”; pictorial matter; 6. a form of entertainment that enacts a story by sound and a sequence of images giving the illusion of continuous movement; movie; film; moving picture; moving-picture show; motion picture; motion-picture show; picture show; pic; flick; 7. the visible part of a television transmission; “they could still receive the sound but the picture was gone”; video; 8. a graphic or vivid verbal description; “too often the narrative was interrupted by long word pictures”; “the author gives a depressing picture of life in Poland”; word picture; word-painting; delineation; depiction; characterization; characterisation; 9. a typical example of some state or quality; “the very picture of a modern general”; “she was the picture of despair”; 10. a representation of a person or scene in the form of a print or transparent slide or in digital format; photograph; photo; exposure;
pic; (v.) 1. imagine; conceive of; see in one's mind; visualize; visualise; envision; project; fancy; see; figure; image; 2. show in, or as in, a picture; depict; render; show;
