To Photoshop* - or Not?
Is ‘Post-Processing’ your pictures ‘cheating’?
Many people believe that doing anything other than using pictures straight out of the camera is ‘cheating’, so I thought I would explain why I believe it is the exact opposite and is absolutely necessary (and is actually already done on your ‘straight out of the camera’ pictures anyway!)
When we view a scene with our eyes, the aperture of our pupils changes constantly to adapt to the different lighting levels in different parts of the scene in front of us…. They get smaller to protect our retina when we look at bright bits and open wider when we peer into dark bits to try to see the details in the gloom.
The camera can’t do that! When your camera takes a picture it can only use one aperture, which is chosen either by you in manual mode, or by the software in the camera if you have any ‘Auto’ programs selected.
The result is actually a database of numbers of photons of red green and blue light in each pixel of the sensor (we call this the RAW file).
For you to be able to see this as an image, there is a ‘Photoshop’ equivalent built into your camera that reads the RAW file and turns it into a picture that you can see, and saves it as an image file (usually a ‘Jpeg’).
So your ‘straight out of the camera’ picture is already ‘Photoshopped*’ for you to be able to even see it at all!
The only difference between you ‘Photoshopping’ a picture on the computer and the camera doing it automatically is that YOU know what it should look like - the camera software has no idea!
As an example, this is a sunset I shot recently:
Image 1 is the RAW file converted to a Jpeg with absolutely no modifications made at all
Image 2 is the ‘Straight Out of Camera’ Jpeg - Post-processed by the camera’s inbuilt Photoshop* equivalent software only
Image 3 is the image after I had ‘Post Processed’ the RAW file in my ‘Photoshop*’ equivalent on my own computer (I use DxO PhotoLab 4)
* PLEASE NOTE: I have used the name ‘PHOTOSHOP’ simply because that is the best known and referred to software for editing pictures.
There are of course numerous other photo editing Apps available (and I personally do not use Photoshop myself)!