Sometimes we see a great picture that could only have been created with Photoshop. There is heavy compositing, retouching and image manipulation that would be impractically to accomplish in-camera. Inevitably, someone asks: After all that manipulation, is the image even a photograph anymore? Or is it a painting? Or something else altogether?
It has been pointed out that there are two different photographic skills: making the exposure and creating the final image. Back in the days of film, we made the exposure on film with our camera and then the final image was a print made in the darkroom. Nowadays we make the exposure with our digital camera and the final image is often a jpeg file produced for the web.
Ansel Adams wrote two books that separated the two processes. One book was called The Negative and it was all about how to properly expose a negative using his Zone System. The other book was called The Print and it was all about taking the negative a making a print in the darkroom. There was also another book called The Camera. Ansel Adams wrote that the negative was like a musical score. The lab technician in the darkroom making a print was like a musician performing the piece. Adams separated the two processes, so they don’t necessarily have to be done by the same person. Even today master printers still make prints using Ansel Adams’ original 8×10 negatives.
In the movie industry, separation of production and post-production has always been the norm. The Director of Photography is responsible for the image, but most of the post-production work is done by specialists like color timers, telecine operators and compositors. In effects-heavy movies the visual effects supervisor makes the decisions on the final image. The photographer may be supplying only one element of a composite image.
So nowadays instead of film we have a CMOS sensor. And instead of a darkroom with chemicals, we have a computer workstation with Photoshop or Lightroom. But despite the major upheaval in photographic technology of the past ten years, almost everything you will read in The Negative and The Print still applies.
The big difference now is that Photoshop makes it a whole lot easier to do massive amounts of compositing and re-touching. Maybe too easy. I learned negative re-touching using pencils or Windsor brush on an Adams Retouching machine. We would mount the negative in the Adams and it would vibrate the negative. You needed a medium format negative and the head needed to be large enough in the frame. But there was only so much retouching you can do on a negative. Some things could only be retouched on the print because with dyes and pencils you can only add density. Even today dust spotting of final prints is still called for.
Today with Photoshop there is practically no limit on what you can create. I suppose you are limited by your skill level and the amount of time you are willing to spend on each image. Photoshop is really a painting program and you can paint anything you can imagine.
So fundamentally nothing has changed. Only the specific tools and techniques have changed. Back the original thought: After all the Photoshop manipulation, is it still a photograph or is it a painting? I will have to ponder that question some more.
