Photographic Editing Offences

[tingeliM]

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EDITING OFFENCES GROUP.
Join now and ask for forgiveness for your sins. Everybody is welcome, you are allowed to ask for forgiveness once a day, the pool is moderated by many disciples of the cause. Come along and wash away your blasphemies in the group pool.

1. Framing
The process of putting a few extra pixels and lines around your digital image to add 'impact.'

2. Watermarks
The needless rape of a photograph because the photographer is big headed enough to believe someone will come and steal his/her photo to profit from it.

3. Selective Colouring
The process of converting an image to monochrome, but leaving one element coloured, such as a tram, or lady in a red dress.

4. The Flood Filter
A Photoshop plugin introduced a few years ago that everyone went crazy for. Everything for about a year was submerged in perfectly generated rippled water.

5. Highly Overprocessed HDR
The latest new FAD... HDR techniques have been around for over 100 years (Yes they have.) But overprocessed tone mapping nonsense from the likes of Photomatix users are all the rage right now.

6. Fake Polaroid Frame
Can't find any Polaroid film? Doesn't matter... Fake it and pretend you're an instant film master.

7. Out of Focus Macros. (BOKEH)
Many thanks to Arty: "Out of focus macros. (You call it bokeh, I call it bollocks. You're supposed to INCREASE the depth of field with close-ups, not leave half the critter/leaf out of focus)."

8. Tilt and Shift Fakes.
Very simple post processing involving blurring a major part of a photograph (usually one overlooking a street.) The selective blurring appears as a shallow depth of field, to give it the photo the appearance of looking like a minature model village.

9. Fake film frames around Digital photographs (similar to #6)

10. Black and White Street Photography
"It's 2009 ffs."(Thank you Arty.)

11. Being a smug wanker/ Purists and Ludites and intentional attacks on photographers artistic explorations.Thank you Goneforawonder
Guilty!

12. TTV (Through the viewfinder.)
As Macredeye says.. "why?" It is basically a photo of what you see when looking through a camera viewfinder. If you want to do it you'll need a small lens. I find my cameraphone does the trick.

13. Cloning yourself / Multiplicity
Keep your camera on a tripod and take 10 pictures of yourself looking like a twat in different positions. Use each file to clone yourself in layer after layer. That'll make you look cool won't it?

14. The Orton Effect.
The original technique invented by Michael Orton was to overlay two or more images of an identical scene with very different exposures on slide film. One image is sharply focused and the others are very out of focus. Alex.Dram points out that he cannot find a reasonable need for it's existence. (Yes I tried it once too.)

15. Supreme Lack of Subject Matter
thank you Wiseacre for this edition. He states that: my personal peeve with any of these techniques isn't the techniques (or gimmicks), but the supreme lack of subject matter. Bokeh is fine, but of lights, raindrops, a leaf -- anyone with a 50mm and able to set their camera correctly can do that.

16. Attempting to digitally recreate an originally unpredictable effect in a very deliberate way.
You've got a brand new digital camera, it takes 40Mp pictures. You have a £1200 lens... Yet you process your photos to make them look like you took them with a £5 Holga.

17. Light trails.
ahh, how cute. You've learnt long exposures and you've had this great and original thought of going to the local motorway overpass with your tripod and taking a photo of all the red and white lights whizzing passed. Guess what? It's not original.

18. Lens Flare
Now I can't believe I left this off the list. It's perhaps the oldest gimmick on photoshop/psp/corel. Tacky lens flare added to photos creating a little sparkle with faded lines all over the picture. Such beauty!

19. Standard full photo filters
Hmm... My photo looks crap. How about if I press this buttom. *BOOM* It's embossed! Or suddenly looks like an impressionist painting, or has the effect of fur or leather or....

20. Planetoids
Ooh look at this lovely landscape. Best turn it into a planet. Oh not just here though. I'm going to do one EVERYWHERE I GO. Planet, planet planet all day long. Click here to see, but beware, you may end up carving out your own eyes with a spoon.

21. View On Black
"Oh god, yeah. That's probably worse than putting a black frame round a photo. If I want to view something on black, I'll print it out and shove it up my arse." Thank you.

22. Photographers who think they are poets
All thanks to Jamalrob for suggesting this travesty. Such titles on photographs as "True beauty lies within" or "I stopped, I stared, I wondered, as I walked through my placid life" .... on a LANDSCAPE photograph. Grow up you pretentious....

23. Listening to Jazz While Editing Your Photos
A serious offence. May lead to any of the above being reproduced.

24. Cutting the corners off
Why? Have I missed some health and safety b*ll*cks? Do I need to put on a Hi-Viz vest before I go into photoshop. Will I take "someones eye out wi that"?

25. Out of Frame
OMFG WTF LOOK! I'm stepping OUT-OF-THE-FRAME. Man, I am SO awesome.

26. Panoramic stitch togethers
ANYTHING... and I mean anything, that ends up as a gimmick that can be used with a mobile phone is a dreadful offence.

27. Immaculate skin
"...portraits with the skin blurred softened into oblivion. Like seeing pores will kill you. instantly." Thank you.

28. Oversharpening
Anyone who goes to a camera club will understand the fact that since digital photography started popping up... so did oversharpening. It's the sick practise of taking an out of focus photo and jacking up every sharpening filter to FIX it. This offence comes with a 3 year ban on digital cameras.

29. Dropshadow/Buttonise
...Or ANYTHING that makes your photo look like it's jumping off the screen. Creating the illusion that your photo is a 3D work of art is a processing crime. If it's a good photo, it won't need it!

30. Texture Layers
Why must you insist on taking another photo of crumbly plaster and using it to take a dump on another photo? Layers of any type of texture are big and not clever. A bit like stupid dwarfs.

31. Infrared Conversion
Crappy landscape? Convert to B+W... still looks crap? Convert to infrared... oooh... look... it glows.... pretty

32. Cropping
Just because you've got a camera that shoots @ 30Megapixel does not mean you can get lazy about filling up the full frame. Get it right first time and remember "crop is crap."

33. ATTEMPTING TO BE CLEVER
This is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable. There is to be no freedom of thought allowed in any photo editing. Here at Flickrschwitz we like minimal curve adjustment and colour correction ONLY. Anything else and vee shall av u tekkin owt zide and zhot!

34. Fractalius
More like syphilis. Take any boring old picture and turn it into some kind of light drawing that will make you want to scratch out your own eyes with a rusty fork. Needless vandalism on your photos.

35. Drink/Drugs While Editing
As demonstrated by many of the thread posters including www.flickr.com/photos/alexdram/, JAMALROB, BLUEBOY & GONEFORAWANDER this may lead to any of the above offences being commited or even worse, topic posts that you may regret in the morning.

36. Straight from my mobile phone and I'm proud of it.
Grow up. Nobody cares.

37. BHL Gimmicks
The never ending camel ride that is BIG HUGE LABS. This is not easy to approach. Everything and anything is available here. It's where View on Black (#21) comes from... Turn your photo into a billboard or a jigsaw. Create instant works of art. This site is photography's version of the Garden of Eden. Please... PLEASE... DO NOT EAT THE ****ING APPLE.

38. Warholizer
So you think you're Andy Warhol do you? Think that you'd look cool/retro/kitsch/chic if you were multiplied and changed into psychodelic colours? You don't. You look like a prat. Just one of you in the correct colour is enough.

39. Portrait Dumping Grounds
Take your boring portraits and jazz them up using a vile uploading process online. Yersinia alerted us to these ever growing ghastly websites of photo destruction. Such sites as DUMPR or PHOTOFUNIA are trainwrecks and need to be cleaned up.

40. Vignetting
Why? You bought a digital camera to get rid of this common film problem. Don't fake it and pretend you're an artist. You little cheat, you.

41. NOT Cropping
Throwing away or leaving as suboptimal a potentially good shot just because you've confused Cartier-Bresson with God.

AND THE LIST CONTINUES
thanks to the original father of this movement, ArchedRoof.

PEOple! Join the fast growing congregation to repent and you shall be forgiven!

Also a blog available @ PEO Blogger

[Jim Bryant]

hahahaha....those are just great!

[dcclark]

Dangit! And here I was planning on popping a few pills, shooting up, grabbing a beer and a bottle of rum, and editing in some borders and orton effects on my severely overexposed HDRs. What a party pooper.

[candleman]

these are good.. except #1

it sounds so much better if you called branding.. ..it is branding... i promise.

[tingeliM]

We are trying to raise our numbers and I'm hoping to recruit a few PEOple from here, so please join us! The discussions are great fun and the folks there are amazing. No need to add photos to the pool if you don't want to. If you like a little fun and random convos with bunch of happy people, PEO is the place for you! :---)

[OsmosisStudios]

No.

#1 and #2 are perfectly fine. Framing does add that last little something to an image, and adding a watermark is almost necessary in our digital world, whether we think it could be stolen or not. That kind of arrogance is just dumb.

#10: Black and White is a technique and look that does have it's place, be it 1909 or 2009. Hating on it is just backwards.

#13: This is a perfectly acceptable experiment. I wouldnt necessarilly do it for everything, but it can be alot of fun.

#15: It's called minimalism.

#17: Light trails can be very interesting if done properly. Yes, the overpass shot is common, but with an interesting subject matter it's a wonderful visual and can be fun for those involved.

#20: Planetoids can also be interesting if theyre done properly.

#21: That's unnecessarilly crass and ignorant.

#26: Getting several frames together and making a panorama can be beneficial and, depending on the circumstance, necessary.

#40: This, too, is something that can greatly enhance a photo if done properly and for the right reasons.

#41: COntradicts #32. If youre gonna comment on cropping, at least do it right.

In any case, these are all very narrow-minded retorts. Just because someone out 'shopped you, doesnt entitle you to make a condescending list of "offenses"

(for the record, I'm "guilty" of 2, 10, 15, 17, 21, 23, 26, 32/41, 40)

[candleman]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

No.

#1 and #2 are perfectly fine. Framing does add that last little something to an image, and adding a watermark is almost necessary in our digital world, whether we think it could be stolen or not. That kind of arrogance is just dumb.

yeah, i agree with that.


its only the really good images that need watermarking.. nobody steals rubbish. therefore watermarking is for the people who actually have the ability to create an image worth stealing. and it does happen.
this forum has highlighted several cases of it within our own membership.

i must say, i had a look at the group ,and sure, some of them are more photoshop than anythign else, some are actually pretty decent digital art imho.

but just for the name of fun i'll let the rest slide...

[dcclark]

OsmosisStudios... laugh, it's funny.

... with a kernel of truth, of course. But it's still funny.

[OeterB]

Forgive me, TingeliM, for I have sinned...

Most of them I've not done (HDR, tilt and shift fakes, for example), but I will in time. Just to experiment. I think these are amusing. Definitely guilty of drinking booze and listening to Jazz... but not normally in heavy concentrations...



Oh, am I guilty of 22? Because, technically, I'm a poet who thinks his a photographer... not the other way around... Do I get a waver on that one?

[OeterB]

Oh, and from the group, one of the new rules...

43. Retitle your photo to "Untitled"
This one struck a nerve in our new GROUP. Not bothering to retitle your picture from the camera file name ie. DSC_0272.jpg is one thing, but actually being so self absorbed that you retiltle your crappy little picture of an abandoned bike in the snow "UNTITLED" is pure blasphemy. A sure sign that the world is coming to an end.

Definitely guilty of that...