Re: [Leica] Photoshop and Leica

["Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic@hotmail.com>]

Dave writes:

> Over the past few months I've seen some amazing
> work done in Photoshop by various photographers.
> Most recently, some fine art 5x7 prints of images
> taken of Paris that were toned various shades of
> yellows and redbrowns. They were absolutely
> stunning. Impossible to do in a wet darkroom.

You can do far more in Photoshop than you could ever dream of doing in a
chemical darkroom; but the tendency for newbies to Photoshop is to go hog-wild
and apply ever filter and tool in the program, transforming nice photos into
wild abstract junk that has a distinctly high-school look to it (because the
major offenders in this domain tend to be high-school boys).

Moderation is very important in Photoshop.

> There's little value in a latent image. The real
> objective in photography should be presenting an
> end product somehow, somewhere.

My goal in photography is to produce an end product that looks exactly like what
I saw when I took the photo.  The challenge for me is to get from what I see to
a paper copy or a displayed image that looks like what I saw.  Photoshop is one
of the tools I use to that end.  But it is very rare for me to modify any photo
to make it look like something I did _not_ see when I took the photo.