Sometimes experimentation is often essential for deeper learning and enhancing quality.
I am an avid Lightroom user as are many of my photographer friends. A few of us even dabble with other apps including Photoshop. Hence, editing a photograph to make improvements or to bring out what our mind's eye saw during the clicking process is not uncommon.
We are definitely not purists.
However, we all get uncomfortable when someone passes an Ai created image as a photograph. Because to us Ai created from scratch image is "synthetic" for a lack of a better word. But that's not to say that we don't use some of the Ai tools that are avaialable to us to enhance a photograph.
Adobe has done an amazing job of adding and fine tuning the Ai tools that they have added to both Photoshop and Lightroom. In the case of Photoshop improvements/fine tunning take place almost on a daily basis.
I decided to experiment with Photoshop's reflection removal. There used to be a time that one had to jump through hoops to remove reflection from someone's glasses or a window in Photoshop. Many, many layers and buttons later one would eventually come close to having a non-glared/reflection photo.
But today's experiment invovled one simple step.....
with a 5 second wait for it to process.....
and all the reflections found in the photograph were removed.Below is a sample of a before and after photograph I took for this experiment. I intentionaly did not use a polarizing filter to see how Photoshop would handle the removal.
What do you think?
Did it do a good job?
Is this an improvement or is this a hindrance from letting people go deeper in their learning process when it comes to photography?
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Good question! I don't know the answer. If instead you'd used a polarizing filters to eliminate some of the reflections, is that OK? Both approaches are using some kind of technology to make the image look different from the actual scene. On the other hand, what you really remember about looking through those windows probably doesn't include those pesky reflections. So the result of removing the reflections is something closer to what you really experienced. How can that be bad?
ReplyDeleteMost works of art are "lies" to some extent; they're just creations to give the viewer a pleasant experience, and I'm OK with that. One thing that does bug me is when landscape photographers replace the actual sky with a beautiful sky from another photo. That increases the viewer's experience, but somehow seems dishonest.
I believe we all have a limit to what we can tolerate/accept as being ok when it comes to manipulating photographs. As you already know this discussion of adding/subtracting to a photo be it in the dark room or tech has been a life long discussion with no foreseeable conclusion. Life goes on with a click here and click there 😉
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