Article on Artists' Desensitization to Color, Photographers' Addiction to Over-processing
Wise words from Tom Till on over-processing, a trap which even seasoned pros often fall into. It's dead easy to fall off the tightrope of realism as you post-process an image, but can you reach the other side with a realistic result? If you set aside the digital manipulation crutches, do you have a strong composition which emphasizes the subject, or does flashy color and over-emphasis of texture substitute for content? To each his own on what constitutes the right balance, but they're questions worth pondering from time to time.
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Digital Pitfalls: A Cautionary Tale | OutdoorPhotographer.com
Tom Till recently had an epiphany about how much enhancement is too much. It’s easy to become enamored of the power of digital to make colors pop, but it’s also easy to become addicted to the point wh…
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I admire Tom Till's candor. For "seasoned pros" the problem is that it is like an arms race. There is no question that saturated photos are more eye-catching and therefore sell better in some markets, esp. on the web. There is a pressure to increase saturation, which can be difficult to resist. When is too much for the general population ? As the success of HDR photographers shows, the limits are quite high.
+Jeff Sullivan , thanks for sharing. I noticed myself doing exactly this but caught myself early on. I have learned 'less is more' and I don't really want my shots to have a gaudy and over-processed look, unless I aim for that.
One thing I have noticed that I don't hear a lot about in Photography circles' is difficulty judging colour for correction. I found this first back in the '80s processing colour negs and prints, I would do test strips for filter correction and if I looked at a sample long enough, my eyes began to accept the colour as normal. I think the brain sees what it expects to see, now what is actually there.
I have the same problem with digital, if I look at an image long enough, colours, look normal, but an hour later they look ridiculously over saturated.
Nowadays, if colour is important, I include a 18% grey card in the first shot and set the white balance in LR to that and apply it to all pictures shot in that light.
I wonder if we have reached the point of no return on this. Black-and-white movies used to be mainstream. These days it takes a great artist to make a black-and-white movie that the public would watch. Perhaps we have already reached that point with realistic photography too? Perhaps realistic photography is already an elite art form? And the rest of us have no choice but to overprocess images if we want to get any attention?
Great article. Very humble words by Tom Till. But he really did go over the top saturation-wise on some of his images though they're all composed extremely well.
Interesting thinking point +Dmitri Plotnikov
I still get annoyed that digital art is now called "photography"
Good point +QT Luong, and in his summary points Tom seems to acknowledge that there's some market demand for the more dramatic images, even while he's advising caution:
"If you like oversaturated colors, it's a free country. Frankly, some of my stock clients and a large portion of the general public like them. Other photographers who may criticize you are never going to pay your bills."
I've seen both sides too. Even while I dialed my HDR way back from about 50% of my results a few years ago to being involved in maybe 2-3% of them today, I still see a few sales of old HDR images which I wouldn't think of producing today.
I find +walter gawronski that if I revisit a photo at least 24 hours after I first edit it, and preferably under different lighting conditions, I'm very pleased that I didn't show that early result to anyone. The "Replace Photo" function is one of my favorites on sites which offer it.
It's a great article – very honest and open. The final conclusions are really interesting – because it seems to boil down to taste and perception, and also a difference between what you could term 'the general public' and 'the knowlwdgable set' – note that I use these terms in gross generalisation and with no intention of placing one group 'above' the other. Similar comparaisons can be made of other art forms – jazz fusion music for example, where a 'pro's' opinion can differ greatly from what most people like – and it can be really personal too… witness some of the 'fluorescent' – for want of a better description – paintings that sell in a lot of art galeries… One of my friends who works on electro-jazz type music was litterally 'raging' on facebook about the number of views 'Gangnam Style' was getting on youtube and how this was definite proof of the decline of civilisation and human intellect in general… could be… and a large part of me would agree… but it is a horribly catchy tune and – I hate to admit it – a pretty funny video… But I digress a little here – so getting back to the point, personally I see the HDR 'over processed' thing as just another tool, another 'way to go' with an image – I got back into digital photos partly through seeing the stuff guys like Trey Ratclif were doing with this – and I wanted to give it a go… now, frankly looking at some of what I do in HDR… I'm not really liking it so much – which is probably just my lack of talent – but I've also found that it's just too 'flashy' and 'gooey-sweet' (sorry about these odd metaphores – I'm not sure how else to describe it) …and so more and more I find myself reaching for the black and white conversion or processing tools instead. But that's a choice also – just my own personal decision. And I've noticed in posts that it's sometimes the horribly flashy stuff that gets more +'es and positive comments. I guess my point is – yes by all means listen to people you admire, yes gain inspiration and direction from them, and yes take criticism on board especially from freinds you respect (I find this 'very' hard to do…) but also remember that you should also stand up for what you are trying to do and – I think this is also what Tom Till might be saying – be honest enough with 'yourself' to constantly re-evaluate and question whether you are really getting where you wanted to go – or whether you are getting sucked into a particular 'fad' or 'style' through over exposure.
+Jeff Sullivan , I have a knack for spotting all the flaws in my images about 3 seconds after I upload them 🙂
But once some critical mass of people heavily process images +Dmitri Plotnikov, how does one then continue to stand out from the crowd?
When Ansel Adams was busy producing black and white large format images, there were a lot of people producing new and more flashy prints hand-tinted with color. You can see a lot of popular old postcards produced that way. How many of the artists producing those can we name today (without resorting to Wikipedia of course)?
Fads will come and go, but it seems that having a strong subject, carefully exposed and supported by a strong composition, is a strategy which crosses mediums (is common between painting and photography) and does not go out of style.
+Caspar Thomas I'd propose that lack of talent has never stopped anyone from being wildly successful with HDR. The bar is so low that off the top of my head I can name exactly one HDR photographer who is careful to capture a reasonable range of exposures so as to rarely end up with blown highlights. The rest seem to start and finish with, and proudly display, exactly the same exposure issues, the dynamic range problem, that HDR was invented to address. To each his own… it's fine if an obvious break between the intent of the process and the result was really what those people intended to produce, but it seems silly to pretend that the intent or result is "high dynamic range" when the highlights are blown.
Well said +Jeff Sullivan, the core of photography will always be here, where fads live hard and die young. Already I'm noticing less garish HDRs and Instagrams posted than when I first joined G+, extreme LE seems to be the current trend.
All these things are fine, but the well crafted photographic image is here to stay.
I noticed the article mentioned photographers that shun 'photoshopping', this is an unrealistic position. It's akin to shunning dodging, burning, push processing, or shunning a knife and fork to eat.
Don't get me started +walter gawronski… the camera sees one exposure across an entire scene, while also dropping all detail in the darkest shadows and brightest highlights. That's unrealistic compared to our optical system, which opens the iris of our eyes in the shadows and stops down in the highlights, and the gap between human and photographic recording is even wider in digital exposures since the dynamic range of the single exposure is often too low.
Our optical and visual perception system is a little bit like HDR, but without the destruction of the color palette or the relative light values across the scene. Some adjustment of shadow and highlight detail is often necessary to combat the unusual and unrealistic look produced by a digital camera, and in the most difficult lighting situations a simple 3 or 5 exposure average can split the difference and produce more detail in highlights and shadows, while preserving the real tone values and colors.
Just to add some more here – our eye actually doesn't really 'see' anything at all the whole image we percieve is composited and processed by the brain from the information the eye picks up over what could be seen as 'multiple exposures' – in fact you could say the process is similar to a multiple picture panorama composite using hdr techniques and also stacked focusing – because your brain will also remember and composite both foreground and background from different focal lengths from your eyes… It also works in stereoscopic vision so we got '3D' in there too… and because it is compositing from memorised shots it's also performing on-the fly editing, adding, deleting, perspective correction, pattern recongnition etc. etc. etc.
Great points +Caspar Thomas, when can I have that camera?
Ironically, after all that amazing processing, while the human perceptual system can discern millions of colors, we have next to no color memory at all. Tests have concluded that the total number of colors we can remember might possibly be as high as hundreds, but also possibly as low as 17.
That really puts in interesting perspective on those times when we say "This is just as I remember it." I'm as guilty as anyone for being (no doubt falsely) confident in my (virtually nonexistent) color memory, but for complete disclosure I'm tempted to add something along the lines "… for all I know."_
Great article!! I really enjoyed it!
+Caspar Thomas is right, I watched a documentary on that topic and the eye does build a composite image for the brain to process.
Many years ago, a couple of uni students did an experiment that lasted for some months, where they wore glasses that inverted their vision, they wore them during the length of the experiment, and gradually their vision corrected itself. However, on removing the glasses, their vision was once more inverted.
The brain sees what it expects to see and can compensate automatically for errors in colour, perspective etc.
Not related to HDR, but to how the human eye/mind perceives images, is the work with photocollages of David Hockney…he claims to reproduce the way the human eye (or mind) perceives a scene, roaming around and focusing at time on small details, then "zooming out" to broader areas.
I posted three examples here: http://goo.gl/T6lPz. He is one of my favorite artists…
+Jeff Sullivan I have followed your works for some time now and for me this is one of the most important articles I have had the pleasure to read and contemplate. There is another Professional I have been following on Facebook, Valerie Millet, whose processes very serenely and soft. Valerie's images have cause me to reevaluate toning down; this article was the final nail in the coffin. Recently when I think an image is completed I have been adding a final Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and sometime globally or more often specific colors, e.g., blues in the sky and reds in the dirt and mountains, reducing saturation around 10%. I like the subdued change I am seeing. Of course, this reduction occurs selectively. I am still a Color kinda guy and not a Pastel kinda guy. LOL
Thanks Jeff!!
Thanks +Jay Gould, I'm always pleasantly surprised to hear that anyone pays any attention to what I'm doing. Sure, people +1, favorite and comment back and forth on photos online, but at the end of the day those are somewhat abstract transactions and numbers.
It's way more cool when someone actually comes back because my work does something for them… inspires, teaches, or simply provides a diversion from the environment they're in. Workshops are the best… I can do all of that in person, and the feedback I get when I take people somewhere unique or teach them a new technique is very rewarding.
I know what you mean about de-saturating images… I'm often up at altitude where the blue light can be intense, so blue in particular can become a bit overdone. I try not to get in a rut though… have to produce enough work exercising artistic license to keep from getting bored, or boxed in by my own self-imposed limitations.