I recently wrote an article on my other website about photo editing. You can read that here Is Editing Photos Lying or Is It Art? Since writing that piece I have been watching tons of videos on photo editing and seeing if my opinion holds.
There were two main premises to that article.
The first was that it’s OK to take an imperfect photo. Life is imperfect and our art should respect that. The second was that it’s not OK to fake a photo. Using AI art and other media is perfectly fine as long as you don’t try to pass it off as a real photo that you or someone you know took with a camera.
I watched a video recently where the creator took a nice photo that lacked contrast and turned it into an image that barely resembled the original. The sun was shining from an unnatural position, the focal point of the image changed, the colors, the brightness… You get it, it was no longer the picture that was taken but an interpretation of what could have been possible.
Like life, we let the internet and comments dictate what we think is correct.
I find that I tend to like photos and art that others don’t. Not in subject matter necessarily but in execution. I like things slightly odd, whereas others may say an image is too grey or lacks dimension I tend to prefer it. Many of my favorite images are black and white for this reason. Take the following photo. It’s nothing outstanding but I happen to like it.
Just a late afternoon shot of traffic and buildings from a higher vantage point. I could do all kinds of things to change the photo but this is what it looked like. Is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know, it’s a photo of reality. Sometimes it just is what it is.
A similar thought on this sunset shot. It’s light from far off and it leaves a lot of things in the dark. Kind of like how it looks to your eye when you squint at the sun.
Once again you could try and edit this photo into something else, but if you do is it still what you took a photograph of?
Final thoughts.
We will all never agree on the topic. Some are die-hard edit all the things, and those who are just as opposed to editing. I think resizing, cropping, and editing for some items is OK. If you completely change the photo into something that didn’t exist it’s a bridge too far for me. Share your thoughts on the topic below.