PS, I Love You!
In Praise of PhotoShop

by Jason Twinhaft

From various photography discussion rooms:
    When you are dramatically altering images though I think it goes from being a photo to digital art....
     Everyone here will tell you that you need to do as much in camera as possible so that you don't need to photoshop....
     As long as Photoshop does not make your photo into a lie, I don't have any objection....
     Photoshop works as an image editor in the amateur to professional world. This may mean 'natural' editing or 'fake' editing, depending on the context of use. Typically, for photograph edits, you want to stay in the natural realm, or, as mentioned, your picture becomes 'art'....
    It depends what you mean by 'adding effects'. There's a point at which you leave the realm of photography and enter the realm of digital art....

In trying to understand human behavior, from the most primitive to the most advanced, one of the great dangers is to fail to take into account the fact that two characteristics are constantly present and at work:
      1. Territoriality.
      2. The herd instinct.

Both account to a great extent for the bizarre, non-rational behavior seen in all organized religions, where persons of lesser and greater intelligence cling together and often fight violently against outsiders, in spite of the complete lack of rational evidence to support their position.

Religion is too easy a target.

Take art, for another, less obvious example, specifically photographic art.

We are at this moment seeing a war in photographic art circles that is as non-rational, myopic, and merciless as that between creationists and evolutionists.

Serious photographers and their supporters emerged bloodied, scarred, but still standing from the 20th century, during most of which "old art" guys (read: painters) mightily (and quite irrationality) resisted the notion that a photograph could be not merely art but-heaven forfend-high art.

The new millennium dawned on a new photographic battle, on two fronts.

First, here came digital cameras. And oh, the yelps and squeaks and screams from the filmists! Pixels as art? No way!

On the second front were the computer tools used to manipulate the new digital images. Art? Impossible! Photographic art is what emerges from a photographic artist's long hours in that sanctum sanctorum, the darkroom.

On the first front, endless critical diatribes were composed, long scholarly treatises emerged that got tenure for lots of otherwise intelligent people, concerning the non-art qualities of the digital camera with its chips and sensors and menus. None of which, clearly, had anything to do with real photography, much less real art.

On the second front, the tool front, one image manipulation program quickly rose to the top and stayed there. Adobe Photoshop (known either affectionately or dismissively as "PS") became--and remains--the standard by which all other image manipulation programs are judged. This, in spite of a daunting interface with menus within menus within menus, not to mention seemingly thousands of tiny icons of usually counter-intuitive design.

You open Photoshop the first time and it's hard to know where to begin. If you finally decide on a starting place, you're then faced with near-infinite numbers of possible things to do which are often labeled in a language whose arcana is right up there with that of quantum physics and interstellar cosmology in terms of incomprehensibility.

Oh the yelps, oh the screams! This is not photography, this is not art, this is mere computerized image manipulation! Why, why, my kid can do this!

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The herd is protecting its territory.

The reality is actually quite simple.

Digital photography has as much artistic potential and validity as any other genre. Period.

It all depends on talent. And talent tells, doesn't it?

Digital photography is still quite a new medium. The geniuses, who are no doubt out there right this minute hard at work on helping us see the world and ourselves in startling new ways, have not yet become apparent. But they will. Soon. And we will all gasp at their work and be grateful for it when it appears.

And Photoshop? That's simple too. Photoshop is the darkroom of digital photography. Period. As with the use of a camera, so too with the use of a darkroom: Talent tells.

Yes, Photoshop is daunting. Its interface can serve as the prime example of the opposite of "user-friendly." But that's because it is a tool whose makers realized that the tool must match the potential of the medium in which the tool is to function.

Certainly, many digital cameras are simple, point-and-shoot devices. But at the highest level digital cameras are sophisticated, sensitive devices for artistic expression of near-infinite potential and versatility. So too with the computer darkroom that Photoshop has given us.

Digital photographs are not the same as film photographs (for a number of important reasons). Photoshop, the digital darkroom, is not the same as a film darkroom (for a number of reasons).

Of course there's lot of bad photoshopping going on. In addition to all the clever (and sometimes funny) "fakes" and paste-ups, there are countless bad photoshopped pictures. But how many bad photographs have come out of film darkrooms? Lots of lesser talents use Photoshop to try to "pretty up" or "fix" their hopelessly deficient pictures. But the same is true of lesser talents in old film darkrooms, yes? In the right hands, Photoshop is an extraordinary tool. Sometimes its effects are so subtle that you're not even aware it's been used. Other times its effects are so striking and original and provocative that the result is breathtaking, and just as in looking at a great, old film print, only later do you maybe think about how it was done.

Art, yes? We are talking about art here.

It's apples and oranges all over again. The mosaicists vs. the frescoists, the red-figurists vs. the black-figurists, the non-perspectivists vs. the perspectivists, the realists vs. the non-realists, the classicists vs. the romanticists, the da-daists vs. everybody, the painters vs. the early film photographers.

It's my territory and my herd, by God. We make the rules, we play by the rules we make. You're either with us or against us.

Now the battle is joined once more.

As for me, I'll sign off by saying simply, "PS, I love you."

END

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