I think we are all well aware that a significant proportion of the images we see in magazines and on billboards bear only a passing resemblance to reality.
While there is nothing new in image manipulation, the advent of digital photography and photo-processing software has placed powerful tools in the hands of the masses. Whether you are shooting a fashion editorial for Vogue or just a quick photo of your kids at a birthday party, the chances are your photographs will almost always receive some kind of treatment - however modest - in post-production.
I find I struggle to maintain an absolute stance on image manipulation and retouching... but it's something I do consider a great deal!
More musings and examples of image manipulation after the jump.
At its most sinister, there is no doubt that the creation of a false reality through the alteration of images plays an important role in generating powerful feelings of inadequacy that encourage us to buy things that we don't need. As a photographer, I am only too aware that I have a serious responsibility to ensure that the work produce represents the nobility of the people I am fortunate enough to photograph. I find images that convey genuine joy much more appealing than images that portray 'beauty' in a very restricted way. In general, I would rather make an image of someone with a big goofy smile and a furrowed brow than a computer-generated android pulling 'blue steel' from behind 17 layers of surface blur.
But on the other hand, every choice we make as photographers - from how we pose a subject, to the lens and the kind of light we use - is, in itself, a creative decision causing our images to represent reality in different ways. As a professional, moreover, I want my clients to feel happy when they see their images, even if they happen to have a very obvious spot or blemish on the day of the shoot.
More often than not I do find that less is more both from a spiritual and an aesthetic standpoint.
In certain circumstances, however, I will embark upon a more audacious project to cover up my mistakes when my creative vision, or that of the client, demands it.
Let's take a couple of images from my recent shoot with Rosie's Smith as examples:
raw image with no adjustments
There is a lot to love about the above image. The different qualities of light are quite interesting, if a bit odd, and the scene looks very three dimensional. The ambient light and the flash are reasonably well balanced and Rosie's blank expression fits beautifully with the quirky scene. She's like 'my guitar takes milk and two sugars, so what?'. The pose is something you might expect to see in a portrait of a middle-aged couple from the 1950s, not a young muso.
But something isn't quite right. The image needs the usual sharpening, brightness/contrast etc. What really bugged me is the coffee pot on the left hand side of the table. It's far too prominent and, as a consequence,very distracting. So out it came in post:
processed image
The is a preconception that image manipulation like this is made quick and easy with image processing tools like photoshop. This is simply not true. It's fiddly, time consuming, and soul-destroyingly tedious! The complexity of the patterns on the table and wooden fence meant that everything had to be perfect so as to avoid abrupt breaks in lines and textures. I also had to basically reconstruct Rosie's arm using bits taken from other images. In the end, I'm not sure you would ever know that the coffee pot has been removed if you weren't looking for it. Was it worth three hours of my life? You decide.
A second example is the image below, that was included in the previous post:
processed image
Now this has obviously had a bit of work done to it. But you might be surprised when you see just how much the image changed from the original raw file that the camera captured:
raw image with no adjustments
Rosie's original comment was that although she liked this image a great deal, she felt the expression was a bit awkward and the pose a bit unnatural. I didn't like the hand so much either. Since this image was the strongest of the bunch in terms of composition and the background elements, I dropped in her torso and head from a different image and blended them together.
As with the other image, the main tools I use for this in photoshop are 'free transform', 'puppet warp', 'liquify', lots and lots of cloning and layer masks... sooooo many layer masks.
These examples give you a flavour of the kind of some of the more extreme work I might to my images in post production.
Please use the comments box below to tell me and others what you think about these images or about image manipulation in general.
Thanks for looking!
images © Sean Afnan 2012 all rights reserved
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