Posts tagged ‘enhancement’
Push it real good
In my last post, I put forth this challenge:
Here’s the game you should play: how far can you push and prod a photograph without your viewer knowing anything was done to it?
Well, I decided to take my own challenge and reworked this image. I took this photograph of my friend Jordan a few years ago in my basement, and decided it needed an update anyway. Perhaps I went too far. You be the judge:
(Roll your mouse over the image to see the original).
I didn’t use anything but Photoshop in this image; no external plugins here.
In a future post I’ll step through how I did it. I can’t post the steps now because… well… it’s a bit involved, and it’ll take some time to write it up. It will definitely be a meaty post. If you don’t want to miss out, you can add this blog to your RSS reader: freemixology RSS feed.
UPDATE, Feb 15, ’08, noonish: Okay, so I went too far. This is what happens when you’re blogging at the same time as looking at David Hill’s inspiring photography. After asking several people at PhotoSIG (a wonderful photography critique site, by the way), I agree that the photograph above is obviously stylized. However, I think it’s stylized to good effect. The tutorial I will post up will have a further revised version of this one.
UPDATE, Feb 15, ’08, 3:21p: Well, maybe I succeeded after all. I put the photo in front of my boss. She’s an art collector, but not a photographer, and that may have been the critical difference. The people who’ve been telling me it’s obviously processed have all been photographers. In fact, when I asked her if she thought it’d been processed, she responded with “no, I just thought you used good lighting”.
Can you see the difference?
(Hint: cover one half with your hand, then cover the the other side)
Some people have sent me comments telling me that they can’t see the difference between the photo processed using this technique and the original. This is both bad and good. Bad because it doesn’t look like I did anything, and good because that’s exactly what I intended. Let me explain.
Photographic enhancement techniques can ruin a good photograph in the same way that the over-application of fonts leads to gaudy, divergent designs. Although you could argue that an over-enhanced photograph is stylized, in most photo-retouching situations, you aren’t trying to stylize the photograph (of course, there are exceptions). You don’t want your viewers to say “wow, you’re good with Photoshop”—you want them to say “wow, I wish I could take a photo like that”. If your viewer can definitively say “after” is better than “before” but has difficulty articulating why, then you’ve succeeded.
Of course, your taste may be different than mine, but that’s part of the fun. Here’s the game you should play: how far can you push and prod a photograph without your viewer knowing anything was done to it?