Photoshop/HDR rant

Today I have to expand on something I have recently written.
I had a miniature rant published in the September 2009 edition of "Practical Photography" magazine and wanted to expand on its content.

Photography is an art form and it's literal meaning is drawing with light. To me this means that a photograph is an image composed and created using a camera - film or digital.

However, recently an odd attitude has spawned from our digital age, a "snap now fix later" mentality which is leading to the deteriorating quality of images on sharing sites and the like, as people would rather take time in photoshop than learning to take a photograph correctly in the first place. The influx of such techniques as HDR is a true killer of photographic competency. For those not in the know it is a photoshop technique for manipulating an image to give a "high dynamic range", which is to show every little ounce of detail in every shadow and highlight which looks very dramatic but unrealistic when done well, but awful for everyone else who gives it a go! There are several techniques which have a similar effect and it drives me up the wall.
I will not launch an out and out rant about photoshop as it's a fantastic piece of software and a great aid in little touch ups to photos, but that should be all a photographer uses it for.


There are some seriously skilled photoshop imagers out there and the same in the photography field but very few have managed to blend these into an new art successfully.

I have a plea to all budding photographers, amateurs please, get the photography bit right before you even consider photoshop; you will find it a much more rewarding hobby if you do! I for example love the feeling I get when a photograph I have taken and not manipulated in any way looks fantastic and the satisfaction of NOT spending hours touching up bits of it afterwards, allowing me more time to do what I love - taking photographs.