Photoshopped?

I met a fellow acquaintance the other day and one of the topics that caught my attention out of our conversation, he had a lot to say about "photoshopped" images.

Basically, he seemed to be totally against "photoshopped" (PS from now on) photographs, and thinks that any photographs or images that had been run through PS and corrected are no longer "natural".

Firstly, everything we see, on books, magazines, Internet nowadays are photoshopped in one form or another.

Secondly, there are just so many things you can do in PS, that you can't simply define an image is "retouched". Unless you use film. Heck, even film can be manipulated!

Thirdly, most cameras nowadays have processors that do pretty much the same with usual photo enhancements (brightening, curves, saturation) to the images straight from the camera.

I figured what he meant to say was "manipulated" images, which usually are images that originally show one thing and come out a totally different thing altogether after manipulation with PS.

Most day-to-day PS artists don't waste time on such manipulation other than to show off their skills. If you want a picture of a cat, for example, you take a picture of a cat, and use PS to make it nicer.

Images gotten off circulation emails.

You don't take a picture of a dog and turn it into a cat.

That's just stupid.

Sure, it may be fun once in a while to play with Liquify, but in most magazine companies or graphic firms, the graphic designers have precious little time to play and manipulate so much of the photograph; they probably have to retouch a hundred or so photos of the same model, do you think they'd retouch, color-correct & Liquify each and every one of them?

When someone tells you that a lot of magazines or advertisements have "retouched" the images of the models on the pages, they are usually correct, but the term "retouched" here means that (on most magazines and adverts) the models usually still look like what they originally are, only brightened up, color-corrected & minus some facial blemishes or photo errors (such as hair sticking out where it shouldn't be). As most photographers will tell you, when such an error in the detail goes unnoticed and only shows up in the photo on post editing, they won't want to waste their time to retake the shot again, they will simply use PS to correct these relatively minor errors.

This however, doesn't mean that PS is a "all-miracle tool" to correct all photographs; the photographer must set up his shot, his set, his model, lighting to the best he could, only the mistakes that go undetected would be fixed. A badly taken photograph, no matter how good the PS skills, will still come out bad.

The common mistakes & PS fixes are (but not limited to):

- lopsided shots, camera being held slightly slanted

- darkening / brightening of certain areas

- removing pieces of studio equipment that somehow got into the shot

- removing blemishes on models' skin, such as unsightly wrinkles, pimples and weird lighting/shadows hitting the models' face in an unwanted way.

- removing bulges that sometimes occur as a result of posing.

The above are corrected for one reason; if the photo is to be printed, they should be printed with as little attention-grabbing flaw as possible. The last thing you'd want is to have a large portrait photograph for a skincare advertisement poster and the pimple or nose hair jumping out at you. These retouching, or otherwise "cleaning up" of the photographs usually don't change the appearances of the model too much.

The more correct term "manipulation" of photos that we read about on emails and my friend kept ranting on are usually photos done by some individual who had too much time on their hands, or they have the luxury of both time and just only one image to work on, because total manipulation of a person's face or body features don't work well with bulk images of that same model.

Because meaning of "Photoshopped image" is so broad, you can't say how one a photoshopped image is "bad" because PS is also used for all the effects, lighting and filters to create surreal images for other types of images for posters, advertising and other purposes.

Photoshop is a good graphic tool software, but the way that these guys are talking about it, they make it sound like it's always a bad thing.