Snip> but just imagine what you could do with it if you started with a well exposed, composed sharp quality image.
No, that’s a lie, what I don’t like is that people who don’t know any better think they can do without all the skills I spent years acquiring – it’s a cheat! But that’s only my opinion and I’m sure many will want to burn me in effigy for having it – I don’t care
I hear what you are saying but in exactly the same way as a wet photographer has to understand the workings of a darkroom to produce a negative that is optimized for printing, a modern photographer has to understand how the software can be used to bring out the best from a digital image.
For example, let us say we are shooting a low key image with all the tones lying in the bottom four stops of the dynamic range of the sensor.
Following traditional photographic practice the capture would be rendered from tones 0 (Black) to 128 (Mid Grey) in each colour channel in an 8 bit image. Fine you might think.
The problem is that the lowest stop of that capture would be rendered with just 16 tones and the brightest stop with just 64 tones.
Any attempt to open up those tones so that they can be properly rendered by a printer will result in posterization and noise being introduced in the shadows.
By understanding this, I can now deliberately over expose my image by one stop, resulting in the top stop being rendered with 128 tones instead of 64 and the bottom stop with 32 instead of 16. In the software you now have twice the tonal range to work with and the end result can be darkened to produce the image you wanted.
Because we are now hitting the sensor with more light the ratio of signal to noise is improved meaning less noise and a smoother tonal range than the traditional correct approach.
I cut my teeth shooting 5x4 or 10x8 sheet film and working in the darkroom to produce prints.
The books on my shelves then were Cootes, Adams, and the like. Now they are Fraser, Eismann and Grey.
Nothing has really changed, I still need to really understand my medium to get the most out of it.
For me it was a steep learning curve because I had to discard most of what I thought I knew and re-learn for the new technology.
The only pictures I missed or lost along the way, were pictures where I thought I knew better from my years of almost redundant experience.
I'm sad that the old days are gone too, but that is what they are now, the old days.
Photography has been revolutionised by digital imaging. When I first started out I kept looking at my old archives and thinking I must scan them someday because there is some really good stuff there.
Now I realise that my best work has been taken in the last few years and it's all digital, and yes, Photoshop is an important part of that, just like the darkroom was in the old days.