hehe - you have the same title as my image from 2 days ago, but with totally different images :)

With regards to post processing, I personally don't like cuting sections out of images and replacing it with something else - like a sky as you mentioned. I will clone or burn out areas i'm not happy with - but I don't think you can really attain an authentic looking image when it comes to slicing them up, without having extensive knowledge and experience with photoshop. I think if I tried it, despite having used photoshop for 3/4 years now - it wouldn't look any decent.

As for photographing others work - I really like this shot because of the contrast. I don't care that it's essentially a photograph of another photograph - you've added your flair and perspective to it, and that's what stands out for me :)

And i've just realised how terrible some of my English is in that sentance. Apologies Dave :S

Me English is not to good either but i like this photo.

djn, hav you ever been too the Benin in Africa? or gone on many trips abroad?

Awooga

I entirely agree with your comment Dave, taking a couple of distractions out of a photo is fine in my opinion. Adding a new background to a photo ruins it, although I've seen a few Pro's add a new sky to a wedding photo!

It's an interesting point to make though Dave, I'm looking forward to the debate to follow!

Good question Dave

Today I was in Waterstones and picked up a book about new practice in digital photography.

It is not the first time in recent weeks that I have come across texts that seem to basically state that nowadays anything goes in photography and the days of straight photography seem to be numbered particularly amongst the so called creative end of the business.

If say we accept that the people who write these texts are experts and in the know, then it may be safe to assume that the alteration to images either by adding or removing elements is fair practise.

I personally don't mind as long as this isn't the case with our news photography. In one sense I think it allows for creative self expression and the opportunity to develop a completely individual style.

I think everything is allowed when producing a picture, but I think there are restrictions for what could be called a photo. Whatever that leaves your RAW converter is definitely a photo, but when you selectively starts to edit the photo, then you, in my opintion, creates a picture or a collage instead.

What about filters then? Is there any difference in using a filter (for example a grad filter) in the computer than in reallity? I don't think so, as long as you reproduce the look of something which could have been created by an optical system and a dark room, I think you may still call it a photo.

But, there's a line where a photo would have been called a trick shot in earlier days - for example putting two different negatives together. So, in my opinion, your shot today is a trick photo. And, you definitely earn some respect by publishing the unmodified version as well, and by that being very honourable.

Apologies for my bad english.

Dave,

First of all: thanks for all the pics. I've been enjoying them for quite a while.

I have also wondered (many, many times) of how the images where before the post-processing... and always wanted to ask you to put some unprocessed images along with the processed ones.

So, please!, put more unprocessed images so we can compare (and discuss) the processing.

Thank you again :)

I really don't consider the 'new' and 'price and size' part of the original image.....you really just took off what added by that company...the image now stands as the original as the photographer took it.....

so I really don't think you altering what you did is considered altering the artist's image.....looks a lot better without all the advertising...

good image.....

Markus,

I agree. When you start adding and removing things I think it becomes digital art or a derivative of the photo. By the definition of photography,:

pho·to·graph (ft-grf)
n.

An image, especially a positive print, recorded by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface.

when you start taking things away that were there or adding things that weren't recorded by the camera to begin with (as in objects, people, skies-retouching doesn't count for me because it's something that has been done in photography legitimately for a long time), it's not technically a photograph anymore.

I guess my line hovers around whether you are enhancing an image (color cast, contrast, brightness, saturation) versus making a significant change (adding or removing objects and probably other things that aren't coming to mind right now).

People will never agree on this subject. It's one that gets people emotional sometimes. :) This should be an interesting debate!

Well let's see. Where to start? 1983 seems a good place - which is the publishing date of this book I bought a long time ago. On page 181 we have the author combining the neg of a tree, with a burnt out sky, with the neg of a nice sky. Nothing new there then.

What else does he do? Well, you name it, he does it - colour to b&w; b&w to colour; montage printing; dodging; burning; cropping; print manipulation.

In other words, it's all old hat just different technology. So get over it already. :-)

As for this particular shot, well, I'm against it. I think it's copying. (Yes, I know, I don't paint the yellow lines on the road or plant trees and stuff or even make the babies that turn into the people we shoot in the street.)

If, however, you'd have thrown something into the shot as a contrast or a comment, well, that would be entirely different. But you haven't, so it ain't.

As an image though, I think it's bloody fantastic.

Really interesting to see the before and after. My first impression of the original did detect any obvious post processing, but looking at the orginal you can work out how u pulled it off. Very impressive use of Photoshop my friend. Love it.

I must say you did a great job with the billboard background; it looks completely natural to me. I think you've forgotten about the image a couple of weeks ago where you pasted into the frame of a sky photo the wing of an airplane. I think that counts as dramatically altering an image. It worked beautifully there, and that's probably why I didn't mind it there and don't mind that you've altered this one: if it works artistically, it's fine with me.

I forgot to add that the first thing I thought of when I saw this shot was the "Man Hands" episode of Seinfeld. lol! :)

I like the alteration from a commercial shot for something to a commercial shot for anything. It's very difficult to draw a line and say this is good post-editing and this is bad. Everything is dependent of the circumstance, and also of what it is you want to convey. The shot here isn't actualy a shot since it has been altered, but it is still a picture. But it holds a different message than the actual shot. I'm talking in circles... My main point is that this is an image, better than the original, but i don't regard it as a actual photo.

Still a great image though.

I love it and do it all the time. There tends to be things from time to time that just seem to distract or remove from the impact of the shot. Keep it up! Great work by the way. It can be difficult to remove stuff like that and still make it look right.

Thanks all.

Rosalind anh Josalind: no, I've never been to Africa. I've visited Australia, the US, China, and a few countries in Europe.

John: yes, this sort of editing in the context of photojournalism is cleary more of a problem.

tom: both images had the same post-processing other than the cloning out of the text.

Ash: good point, I hadn't thought of it like that.

Enike: I think your definition is a little strict. For example, if you have dust on your lens when you take a shot and you subsequently clone it out - does that mean it's not technically a photograph?

Judith: I hadn't forgotten about that image, I just wasn't thinking of it in the same way. That one was a combination of two separate images, this one just had various alterations made to it. I do take your point though.

I like the before and after pics. Was it straight forward reproducing the patterns to replace the price tag?

Great stuff. I look forward to your daily posting, and just wanted you to know that I especially appreciate your links to "originals". It's fascinating to see the before-and-after versions. Thank you.

Dave,
I really enjoy it when you post the original along with the post. I have started doing it on my site, even though I am a PS amateur and don't have much to show off.

As for the ensuing argument, I'll add my $.02. It has been mentioned before, but what comes out on film is not what we see with our "eyes." Kodak and the like have been spending the better part of the last two centuries trying to get film to replicate what we see. I say "eyes" because it is really our brains which interpret the light waves hitting our retina. What we finally see is always modified by our brain, adding contrast, saturation, ignoring bits, etc. We've all got a blind spot in each eye and never notice it because your brain fills in the gaps. How many times do you take a shot and then when you look at it, there are distracting things that you didn't notice when you took it? Your brain edited it out, so to speak. Witnesses at a crime scene all interpret events differently, even though they were all watching the same events.

So I guess my point is that I think we should be able to create on the computer or in the dark room what we would have liked to have seen or what we did see when we took the shot if it didn't quite come out that way in the digital file or on the negative. Perhaps the real argument is a matter of semantics: do you consider yourself a "photographer" or an "artist"? I think we all know where you stand on this and it's something that each has to decide for him/herself and accept what others decide for themselves.

I like this image and feel it is much, much stronger without the text.

Re altering images. If Ansel Adams could dodge and burn to the degree he did to remove and enhance aspects of his work and survive with his reputation intact then that is good enough for me. The questions that need to be answered imo are: 1. is the alteration done to a high technical standard? and, 2. does it result in something which is asthetically pleasing? I think the answer to both questions in this instance is yes.

Photographing somone else's art - is it a new piece of work or just a publicity shot of the other image? - is another question and one that I posed here on photo.net last year, without really getting much of a discussion going. Essentially, I believe if an image can be seen in a new context then it is a worthwhile undertaking. If not, then there are plenty of other subjects to be snapping at. Again, I think you pulled it off here as well.

Just my my nocturnal ramblings in the middle of a quietish night shift.

Cheers

Nice shot Dave, interesting how dark the sky is. Is that also pp?
I'm not going to get into the debate about imaging. I think that the purists' position is indefensible.

Maybe the purists are just afraid of technology?

This debate has been going on in photography since at least the 1850's when Gustave Le Gray started combining images of sea and sky. In the early days, film was very sensitive to the blue spectrum and skies would become blown out. So to overcome this, Le Gray seamlessly combined two separate shots with different exposures to get the look and feel he was after. The critics praised him for achieving what no other photographers of his time where able to do. And yet, others photographers ridiculed him for not being true to the image.

Going along with what blake said, our minds definitely interpret our mental image of a situation. We frequently leave out or create details that completely alter our perception of reality. I find photography so rewarding because it allows me to show others how I view the world around me. With any scene you photograph you are selecting which elements you see and more importantly, which elements you don't see. In this image you have just taken that idea to the next step showing us how you saw the image. I see it as a natural progression and in some cases a necessity. As previously stated this does not apply to photojournalism.

Where I disagree with blake is in the need to decide if you are an "artist" or a "photographer". In my book they are one and the same. Keep the great shots coming. I love it.

I love your post processing techniques.

HTML is allowed. Leave a clear line between paragraphs.

I'll try that again! ;-)

I tend to restrict myself to something close to what I was intending when I take the photo. A bit of personal honesty as nobody else is aware of that thought process.

great photo.. the idea of this is really interesting

Nice editing job! I like how you've also darkened the blue background. Thank you for showing the original photo.

One of my hobbies is editing my pictures to the extreme and calling it "photoart"....it's great fun to do in PS, maybe you will/have try/tried this?!

Thanks everyone.

Post-processing debates are endlessly perplexing to me, since I'm always surprised when people insist that certain specific techniques are OK but others are definitely not.

As best I can tell, some people reflexively believe that any photorealistic image is an attempt to reproduce, as accurately as possible, exactly what a scene from the real world looked like to a dispassionate observer at the time the photograph was taken. If there is any significant "alteration" to the image, they perceive this as fraud.

Although this understanding of photos is appropriate in certain limited, editorial contexts, this attitude is generally naive and blinkered. It's naive because photos are not reality, and the pinhole they provide to the world at the time the image was taken is endlessly unreliable even without sinister intent on the part of the photographer. It's blinkered because it precludes a whole area of artistic expression, and who would want to shut themselves off from art?

Edit away, I say.

Rereading my comment, I realize it sounds a little harsh. Let me try to soften it a little: in truth, I can understand the reflexive outrage of someone who thought a photo was intended to be a realistic portrayal of a scene, only to learn that it was somehow significantly altered. But I think that because alterations are so easy to perform, and because photos are unreliable to begin with, it may be better to think of all photorealistic images as mere impressions of the world, rather than a faithful reproduction, unless the creator is explicitly claiming a photojournalistic intent.

Any better?