What are your thoughts on Photoshop?

First off, Photoshop is overpriced; use GIMP instead.

Personally, I think it’s a little bogus to retouch photos for any purpose other than to restore a damaged original, but when you consider the amount of makeup and cosmetic surgery many of these people undergo, retouching images is almost moot. You may as well just omit the person and go totally CGI anyways. I mean, a fake picture of a fake body/face is almost as fake as utter fiction!

My experience with photoshop is that it’s a powerful and versatile program, great for making art. It can be used for good or evil- the fashion industry is using it for evil, I think. Of course they have an incentive to get the best picture they can, because that will sell the most products, but that sets up standards that don’t even exist in the real world, and which we can never live up to.

You might like photoshopofhorrors.com.

Its a double-edged sword.

Photography as an art has basically been killed by it. Apply a couple filters to a random snap shot, do a small crop, and bam! Its a hit. A work of art. Photoshop along with the revolution of digtal photography have made composition and thought obsolete when it comes to taking pictures. All you have to do is shoot shoot shoot in “auto” till something good happens to pop up. Skill doesn’t matter anymore in a formerly great artform. Its tragic, really.

On the other hand, it can be handy to adjust a RAW file’s white balance and exposure values in editing.

I’m not against editing a photo. Its when you have to do it to make the photo when it gets bad.

@kenmc I totally agree with you! When the original photo is unrecognizable, I no longer consider it a photo; more like digital art.

@kenmc – I agree to a point, but you still need an understanding of composition, a good eye, and the other things people used to learn about film photography to do really great photos.

My daughter is a good photographer who uses both film and digital photography, and sometimes she edits her photos, but the really great ones are the ones that don’t need the editing and “whiz-bangs”. They are the photos that capture something – a look on my grandchild’s face, the sun behind the mountain with the city lights coming on, a rainbow at the perfect moment. She is an artist with the camera. I, on the other hand, do “snapshots” with my camera and sometimes I luck out. I could never afford photography with film – I’m just not that good.

There is still an art out there. :-) The bells and whistles from editing are cool, but for it to be an amazing work of art you have to start with something amazing. The real art is still in the picture itself.

@llewis Your daughter is not the norm. And very commendable. And yes, there is still art. Its just drowned in a sea of poseurs complimenting each others shots of empty lawn chairs manipulated with a poladroid/holga filter.

… I’m a gimp junkie. I will edit a photo until it looks like something completely new, something born in a different light. I am biased, of course, but I do feel like it is art. The further away from the original image, the more it resembles art in my eyes. Retouching a photo to remove an unflattering shadow or a blemish is one thing.. to completely transform it is a totally different story.

@kenmc “Photography as an art has basically been killed by it. Apply a couple filters to a random snap shot, do a small crop, and bam! Its a hit. A work of art.”

What? How does the ability to apply obvious Photoshop filters to a picture that will immediately be recognized as a bad picture with Photoshop filters applied to it kill photography as an art? It takes more than just a few mouseclicks in Photoshop to turn a poor photo into a good one. Photo manipulation is a skill on its own, and in fact, it takes knowledge of good photography to recreate good photography. Image editing programs are definitely not advanced enough to take the art and skill out of photography, not yet at least.

A lot of stuff in photoshop comes from things that people did with film before computers. With photoshop you just removed the tediousness and excessive use of chemicals and paper.

i love it, you can do some cool stuff, but it’s not a replacement for good photography (cough film cough)

Photoshop is just a tool. A tool cannot be good or bad; it can only be used.

It has hardly killed photography. It has expanded the range of things that people can do with their photography, but not killed it as an art. True, people who don’t have their technical skills down pat can make their under/overexposed shots look better, but it takes more than a good handle on exposure to make a good photographer. Photoshop can’t fix focus, and it can’t fix composition, and those are two of the hardest things to get right.

What one can do with photoshop is amazing. There are creative things you cannot do any other way that I know of, and if you had to do some major clean up etc. on a photo with bad composition (trees sticking out of heads, etc.), I believe Photoshop is the way to go. However, as you have said, it can be abused and is often done. It is almost to the point you cannot believe anything you see in a magazine anymore.