To post-process or not?

[scubabbl]

I've had my D90 for about a month now and takes lots of photos. But, my problem is getting on camera what I see. I can always seem to trick it out of the picture afterwards using photoshop or some other editing tool, but is that cheating so to speak? Should I be able to capture what I see with the camera as is?

I've posted a few pictures, and all over them are cropped and/or have been tweaked in some way or another. I feel a little dirty saying "Look there, at my picture..." when I should be saying "Here's the overexposed crap I took, and now look there, at photoshop's pretty picture".

[candleman]

i dont think theres a professional in the world that doesnt process to some extent.
its not cheating, (unless you edit the pic SO much you wouldnt know it wasa the same picture)

theres a dozen or so debates in here on this tho',... a search wil reveal a few results.

the resounding answer you will hear IMHO is.. "processing has been around since the film days.."
so its nothing new and its not cheating. photoshop is just a digital version of the darkroom.
how far you want to take it is up to you.

[bearly]

i agree with candleman... film photographers processed in the darkroom, digital photographers process in photoshop

[scubabbl]

Thanks for the replies. I feel less stupid now.

[Bluenoser]

Why is it Photoshops picture? Did you do the PP, or did you just open the image in PS and then watch while it did everything?

It's never cheating, no matter how much PP you do. It's your image, and you're the one doing the PP. The software is just a tool, same as the camera is.

[Taallyn]

Basic tonal, color, lens and exposure adjustments as well as cropping have been done in the darkroom for as long as people have been taking photographs. Sure, Photoshop can allow you to go way beyond that, but then again so did the old darkroom if you knew what you were doing.

[beatles2]

I think we need to embrace new technology. I enjoy working on photo on the computer almost as much as I enjoy taking the shot. almost.

[wulf]

For the first few months I had my D40 I hardly did any post processing and tried to push the limits of what I could get out of the camera. I'm glad I did that for a season but I'm now back in the habit of applying a little extra polish to most of my shots - even an excellent picture can generally be improved with a bit of extra care and attention.

Therefore, while I think there is nothing "dirty" about the digital darkroom, it may be worth spending a while trying to make the most of what you can do in camera only so that, eventually, the quality of your finished pictures can be even higher.

Wulf

[RoyL]

Darkroom is for film as software is for digital. If the software is being used to work the contrast, correct tonality, sharpen an image then this is acceptable working of an image, even for Stock Photography libraries.

Where the line starts to become vague is when Layers are used, or certain tools such as Dodge and Burn. Some Stock sites will not accept images that have had dodge and burning done using the standard tools, this can be worked around by using a Layer (with Soft Light mode) and the Dodge tool.

And digital manipulations are not acceptable in most contests but can be accepted by certain competitions and will also be accepted by Stock libraries.

At the end of the day it really depend on the reason for the use of editing software. I use Photoshop for finishing my images off, but I also use it for artistic expression.

[maskedfan]

Until I got into using Photoshop, I didn't play/work in the darkroom to a greater extent than simple contrast adjustments. Now I dodge, burn, sharpen etc.

On that note, it seems somewhat ridiculous that the dodge and burn tools shouldn't be used in software - they have translated fairly literally from the darkroom, even down to the names