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Backgrounds in general

from Tundra Slosek (tundras@draconis.com)
Allan,

I've played around with defocussing backgrounds in the past - as well as more extreme things like wiping all the saturation from the background, or using "sharpen" on the background excessively and then running smooth on the background over and over. At this point I've decided that I don't really like such manipulations. While I don't really take any photos for anything other than my own pleasue (so I don't have to particularly worry about the whole ethics question), I find that the only kinds of post-exposure editing I am comfortable with are cropping (which this particular image is), dust/scratch removal and image-wide exposure control.

I watch people at work dodge/burn regularly, and while I understand why they are doing it, I find that the original image, while "weaker" (the eyes are too dark, etc) just feels better. If the editing was done perfectly (in the sense that I couldn't tell that it had been done), would I have the same objection? Probably not.

For myself, it boils down to "if it isn't right on the film, it probably isn't worth fixing in Photoshop". When it comes to judging other people's work... as long as the edit doesn't distract from the whole - I don't really care.

OT: Quotes - preview would be nice, but like I said... you would think I geek would be able to do it right the first time. In fact, I work on one system (Nortel SL1) which doesn't have any concept of a backspace/del function at all. If you hit either key - it spits out an error and makes you start entering that line all over again. What a pain in the tuckus!

OT2: This is why (at the heart of it) I ended up shelling out the bucks to own my own domain and control the server for it myself.

(posted 8671 days ago)

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