Commentary on the use of Photoshop in photography.

[DevilsAdvocate]

The Trees of Big Talbot Island



There are few places in Jacksonville that are as beautiful and mysterious as the beaches and trees of Big Talbot Island. Generations of Floridians has been bewitched by the phosphorescent sands and waters of the beach and used the fine white clay of that beach for pottery and ceramics.


Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2012-jun-the-trees-of-big-talbot-island

The trees are beautiful; the Photoshopping is horrendous.

Even the tree trunks look blue because of the terrible color correcting job. This area is beautiful enough without faking the colors.

[gjosephunf]

DevilsAdvocate feel free to share images. I hope to spend an afternoon after class one day, venturing throughout the park and plan to sit among such majestic trees.

[AshleyLauren]

DevilsAdvocate feel free to share images. I hope to spend an afternoon after class one day, venturing throughout the park and plan to sit among such majestic trees.

It appears it is just the article header that overused the blue because the rest of the photos are pretty spot on to how the area looks in person.

[TheCat]

I appreciate the spiritual allegory. " Devils advocate " makes accusations without looking at the whole picture. Brilliant!

You can do photoshop badly but photoshop is not, in and of itself, bad. If a photographer uses photoshop to Adjust their images it is still a time taking, skill required process. so, the next time someone says "scoff, it's been photoshopped..." you can imagine a person who is honing a required digital craft to produce their work.

[DevilsAdvocate]

" Devils advocate " makes accusations without looking at the whole picture. Brilliant!

You can do photoshop badly but photoshop is not, in and of itself, bad. If a photographer uses photoshop to Adjust their images it is still a time taking, skill required process. so, the next time someone says "scoff, it's been photoshopped..." you can imagine a person who is honing a required digital craft to produce their work.

Your uninformed post is pretty ironic.

I viewed the whole gallery and my post was based on an obvious trend in the color correcting applied to those photos. I have worked as a photographer and a photo editor, editing dozens of photos for publication in print on a daily basis. I have also shot photos at Big Talbot numerous times before and know what that area looks like.

Sorry, but the tree trunks and shadows on the island are not blue.

I imagine the photographer/editor is a student. So, chalk this up as an educational experience. When you jump up the blue values across an entire photo it takes away from the beauty of the subject of the photo.

[TheCat]

DevilsAdvocate, curious, do you believe that using photoshop is somewhat of a cheat? Or,  that this series failed to use photoshop effectively?

[DevilsAdvocate]

@TheCat: the latter. Color correcting on photoshop when applied appropriately can be a very useful technique for correcting issues with the exposure, white balance, and the like. It can be used to make a photo look closer to what the subject actually looks like (and when publishing in print format, especially on newsprint, it's a necessity in order to compensate for the imperfect printing process and less than pure white papers).

That is not what was done here. A quick look at these photos and it's obvious that the editor dramatically increased the saturation levels of the cyans (blues) to make the sky, the leaves, the water look more dramatic and eye-catching. Regardless of whether the photos are intended to depict what the area actually looks like or are intended to be more artistic shots, these photos were poorly color corrected as the editor increased the cyans across the whole photo rather than only in those areas where it was intended. The result was that the bark and the shadows in this photo all have a bluish tint to them which they do actually have and which almost certainly was not the editors intent.

[Debbie Thompson]

Good critique if it was intended to teach Lisa ways to improve her color correcting, although if that's the case, Devil's Advocate could have been a bit gentler in the initial approach/comment.  :-)    It taught me something about color correcting.  I hope it doesn't deter Lisa from posting other photos. I certainly enjoyed them, and got the spirit of the photographs.

[avonjax]

I have a question for DevilsAdvocate. Are you a photographer or graphic designer? And do you use Photoshop? I promise I am not trying to be confrontational, just curious.

[avonjax]

Lisa, if you see this I have a question for you too.

[avonjax]

Also for DevilsAdvocate I don't think Lisa was color correcting at all. If she was color correcting these shots would look nothing like this.

[thekillingwax]

It comes across like an attempt at HDR, not sure what the real intent was but they honestly give me a headache if I stare at them too long- the finished product honestly seems like some sort of 3d anaglyph filter- like this image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dusk_on_Desert.jpg

[avonjax]

I avoided calling them HDR but they do have that appearance. The sky has to be tweaked to avoid odd colors when you create HDR files. There is chromatic aberration which can be reduced in Photoshop. But I still enjoyed them. I love Big Talbot and it's a great place to get some great shots. 

[Ocklawaha]

Stephen is going to love this! I'll be confrontational! Photography is art, graphic design is art, and beauty is in the mind of the beholder.

Are the tree's blue, or are they purple? How red is red? How much heat comes from orange? Is yellow sickly? Why does pink soothe anger? Of course these are all subjective questions, like when Buddha said, "If you think you heard a flower then it's a flower that you heard."

"What would you do if I sang out of tune, Would you stand up and walk out on me? Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song, And I'll try not to sing out of key," so said one 60's-70's poet musician. So tell us, are fantastic, metaphysical and surrealistic subject matter and Kaleidoscopic, fractal or paisley patterns less an art then what appears in the shutter of your camera, or the layers of your photoshop program? I think not.

To attack someones creative spirit because you don't like their interpretation of a subject, does not demean that subject matter in any way, but reflects on your own level of artistic appreciation.

[DevilsAdvocate]

@avonjax: I have worked as a photojournalist and a photo editor for a newspaper, shooting digital and using photoshop to color correct and edit photos for use in print.

I have also done a smaller amount of landscape and other more art-focused photography where I would use photoshop to enhance the colors within the shots to make them more appealing to the eye at the cost of sacrificing the authenticity of the actual scene that was shot.

Agreed I probably came across as a bit harsh, but I do think my point is valid.