deuse;30481848 said:
I've never understood why people use such programs. Wouldn't it be better to learn how to use your camera instead?
Here are a few reasons... I've had some of these in my head for a long time, as every time I see a lightroom or photoshop ad on facebook there are inevitably several people in the comments raging about how any kind of digital manipulation is the same as killing babies, so they're not all directly targeted at you - I'm aware you haven't said that all manipulation is bad
I just want a post I can copy & paste from later.
Putting aside that people consider photography as art and manipulation as part of that art - Even if you are just trying to accurately reproduce a scene, a 2 dimensional image viewed on a display or a print is just one representation of the scene. In many situations it's literally impossible for a camera to give you results that actually reflect what you saw when you took the picture.
Try taking a picture of Nelson's column on a reasonably cloudy day and you will end up with either a well exposed nelson with a totally white sky or a well exposed sky with a totally black nelson. The dynamic range of the real world cannot ever be accurately represented by a 2d displayed or printed image. Using lightroom or photoshop can bring the detail back to both the sky and the clouds by reducing the dynamic range back down to something that can be displayed. Yes, in camera HDR does exist in some cameras but editing software give you real control of the process.
Beyond that, is photography about recreating a scene exactly as it was or as you experienced it?
A lot of people complain about adjusting colours, contrast etc. in software and proclaim the straight-out-of-camera images as some kind of truth. whereas in reality the camera is taking RAW sensor data and applying a few pre-set adjustments to it to produce one, one-size-fits-all interpretation of the scene. By shooting in RAW and adjusting later you can take full control and come up with an interpretation that more accurately reproduces how you saw the world at that moment and how you felt.
Just like how in the days of film, most people left it up to the shop to process their negatives in some catch-all way, while darkroom photographers could tweak their processing for different results, dodge and burn different areas etc.
Editing items out of a shot can be contentious, but looking back on when you were there experiencing the moment, do those telegraph lines really feature in your memory as prominently as they do in your photograph? A 2d image makes these kind of imperfections much more obvious because they're fixed in one place in the image, whereas when moving through the 3d world you're able to mentally filter them out.
Local adjustments can very subtly draw attention to specific features or areas of an image and can't be applied in camera.
Some people spend hundreds of pounds on a variety of graduated ND filters for landscapes, but with modern RAW processing it's cheaper, easier, and above all more flexible to produce the effect in software.
