Does digital post-processing turn photographs into something else? Explore some competing points of view and take a philosophical walk through the annals of photographic history to clear up some improper perceptions of digital post-processing….

Firstly, to anwer your title question: “Is Digital Post-Processing Illegal”? . I would have to anwer most certainly “No”. Digital photography along with the all of the digital enhancments provided by Photoshop is a new photographic as well as artistic medium. It can be compared to traditional methods but perhaps not meant to be forced into the same traditional meaning of photography.

The distinction between taking photographs and taking artistic photographs should be addressed. You stated in your article that “digital photography had completed the transformation of post-processing into an art form itself…”. An art form perhaps, but only art if handled by an artist. Painting is an art form, but not all who paint are artists. What modern post-processing has done to and for the photographer is to make techniques easier and instant, which can mesmerize a novice into thinking that they are creating art and/or a competent photograph.

This distinction, in my opinion, is more the question than whether or not it is legal. For example: Is digital animation as artistic as the hand drawn ways of the past? In many ways, it is not. Much aestheticism is lost. Perhaps an aesthetic issue should be part of your concern between the old and the new? What do you think? The newer technologies are less hands-on and more virtual. Not bad, but certainly different and requiring one’s involvement to be less intrinsically personal. More emphasis is placed on the product than the process…a long debated art theme!!!

I don’t think that when “ a photograph passes into a different state of being and loses its status as a photograph” it is “purely semantic”!! If a photo loses its status or its integrity as a photograph in the artistic sense, then it had better get itself another name! And, THAT is the crux of this entire debate….in my humble opinion.

The main point that I hope my article got across is that editing such as dodging, burning, hand-coloring negatives, and other “traditional” techniques produced work that was unquestionably accepted as “photographic.” Nowadays, the same effects are possible using Photoshop, et al., and those results tend to be accepted as “photographic,” but a few steps further down the editing pipeline, suddenly people are up-in-arms, decrying these prints as “digital media,” etc.

What is fascinating to me is that traditional darkroom techniques developed over years and years, offering more and more flexibility, and never was the final product’s status as a photograph questioned. Suddenly, digital is changing the way we look at photographically-derived work. Changing the way we evaluate it.

Returning to the debate, I think you and Shae have hit the nail on the head as to what the issue is here.

The problem is whether or not a photograph loses it’s status as a photograph after a certain amount of editting.
If it does lose it’s status, at what point can we define that as having occured.

I have tried to approach this from a logical point of view rather than an emotional one (as I am definately a photoshop junkie and as such can’t help but resent suggestions that my images are any less worthy than another persons’).

With my logical head on I first considdered the term photograph. As a ‘photograph’ refers only to a singular item (image), with a number of images being refered to with the plural ‘photographs’ my first thought was:

“As soon as the individual uses more than one image in a composite the image is no longer ‘a’ photograph”.

The problem arose when I tried to compare the analogy to automobiles. If you take two cars and cut them in half, then weld the front of one car to the rear of the other, you still end up with ‘a car’ (albeit one you wouldn’t want to buy second-hand)!

This led me to the conclusion that all artwork which involves photographic capture is ‘a photograph’. The best way to manage the field would be to add a suffix to the title such as the following:

Photograph – Historic Record
No post processing other then brightness, contrast and white balance and all with the aim of reproducing reality.
In addition the original image captured by the camera must not mis-represent reality.

Photograph – Artistic
A single image which has been taken and manipulated to produce a result which pleases the photographer (&/or client).

Photograph – Composite
An image composed of a number of images and manipulated to produce a result which pleases the photographer (&/or client).

Of course the problem this presents is that having defined a new set of guidelines we have a whole new set of ambiguities. For example a war correspondent who takes a photo which compresses distances. He may have chosen his equipment in order to do this as it best represented the feeling of danger which he was experiencing. He has still followed the guidelines to portray reality but everyones percetion is different.

How would you classify a photograph created by compositing two separate exposures of the same scene? For example, HDR, or more classically the “Orton effect?” Is that still a photograph?

My friends and relatives have called me pedantic in the past, but in this case, I tend toward the position that any photographically derived image should be classified as a photograph unless someone can come up with a very convincing argument to the contrary. I agree with you that there is a huge chasm dividing archival, documentary, and forensic photography from artistic and aesthetic photography, but I am mostly concerned with the latter. It goes without saying that even a small touch from Photoshop can discredit forensic photographic work, which is why they make those encrypted media cards and so on.

I think that correspondents and photojournalists labor under an entirely different set of expectations and definitions, and although some of their work is highly artistic, it is what it is; a documentary photograph. My fundamental point is that an artist should be driven by their own process and their own desired outcomes and not by definitions and semantics.

Thanks again for participating.

It was Talbot, not Herschel, who invented the positive/negative photographic process. He used paper as a suport for his negatives since it would absorb the silver nitrate solution. Herschel’s main and possiblely only contribute to photography was to tell his friend Talbot to use hypo to fix his paper negatives.

Archer invented the glass plate wet collodion process and published his discovery in March 1851. Since it solved numerous technical problems of the earlier processes, it soon became the prefered method of photography for the next 30 or so years.

Other than this minor error, I found your article well written and interesting