Image Fiddling
This blog will focus primarily on my experiences of digital photographic retouching as a profession. Over time I intend to explore the various different styles of retouching and the many different techniques used to produce professional results. But before I get started on all that stuff I want to share a little history with you.
If you’re at all interested in image editing I think it’s important to know a little about where it all started.
HISTORY
Image editing has been around for a very long time. Many years ago traditional photo editing was known as photo retouching and was performed by extremely skilled individuals. They used various darkroom techniques to allow them to alter images such as double-exposure, piecing photos or negatives together, dodging and burning and scratching polaroids. But there’s only so much that these techniques could accomplish. Significantly modifying an image involved actually painting onto the photographs or negatives with ink or paint using an airbrush. Even though tools such as the airbrush are no longer used for photo retouching you’ll still hear a lot of people use the term ‘airbrushing’ to describe digital retouching.
The 1980s saw the advent of digital retouching and consequently a lot of the old techniques became obsolete. The late 1980s saw the first appearance of Adobe Photoshop running on the Apple Macintosh and traditional photo retouching largely became a thing of the past. Photoshop is seen by many as a digital dark room and many of the traditional techniques such as dodging and burning remain.
The way that images are edited now has changed somewhat from a few years back, but the reasons for editing an image remain pretty much the same.
WHY EDIT?
The main reason for editing or altering existing imagery is to improve the image beyond what was capable when the shot was taken with a camera. This can include a number of adjustments such as simple colour or perspective correction, changing brightness and contrast, hue and saturation as well as the removal of scratches, dust or blemishes to more drastic changes such as the removal of distracting elements to draw focus to the subject, improving overall composition or merging one or more individual images into a single file.
The are many reasons why an image is edited. The changes made will usually result in an improvement. Practically every image you see in todays popular media culture has had some work done to it. Movie stars, musicians, fashion models and the world of advertising are all heavily focused on image and the better that image can be made to look means the more power it has in delivering a message.
But now also consider how it would be possible for a Holiday company to alter imagery of your possible holiday destination. Imagery is used to sell either a product, a service or an idea, but when those images are altered to a point where they are no longer representative and are no longer a truthful depiction there can be repercussions.
There’s been a lot of controversy over the years about what is acceptable and how far you should go with image editing. The moral repercussions of deceiving the general public into believing what they see is a troublesome topic and I’ll tell you about some of the more well known cases over the next few weeks.
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