Since the advent of digital photography and digital editing software, it has become far too easy for photographers to take really badly exposed images and correct them in post processing. While the end result yields a better image than what was captured, sadly this is NOT really photography, yet as we progress more into the digital age, such image manipulations are being passed off as professional photography and even worse as “fine art”.

In this tutorial I will show you examples of what I mean and how I can take what I consider a really shoddy image (yes even pro’s take shit shots from time to time) and how I can turn that image into a much better looking image, but is it photography? Personally I say not really as what I am about to show you crosses the line from photography into the world of digital manipulation and the resulting image is a digital image but I personally don’t consider it to be an actual true photograph any longer.

We start out with our RAW image straight from the camera. The image was captured against the setting sun which causes the camera to hit all sorts of obstacles when trying to expose this scene. We don’t want to lose the lovely orange glow of the sky and as a result we capture that but all the shadow areas are completely blacked out. The starting image below shows the resulting situation many a photographer is faced with. We captured that lovely glow of the sky but there is no detail in the shadow or midtone areas, at least that’s what we think.

Our starting RAW image, unedited straight out of the camera. This is how the camera interpreted the exposure and had you been shooting with film this is pretty much what you would be stuck with.

So now how do we go ahead and rescue this photograph? First of all I open this RAW image in my favourite RAW processing application and the manipulation begins. I first introduce “Fill Light” so I crank that slider from 0 to about 85. I then play with the tone curve profile of the image (highlights, lights, shadows and darks). I drag my shadow slider up to about +45, I’ll take the Darks slider to +25, I’ll take the Lights slider to -25 and finally I’ll push the Highlights slider to +10. I am now left with the following image but I’m not quite done yet. Amazing to see how much information the camera really captured in the shadow but the manipulations carried out thus far already exceed the actual exposure.

We've done some minor adjustments in our RAW editing programme, manipulating the shadow and midtone areas. Suddenly we start to see something peering out of what was previously total darkness.

Okay so things are looking a little better now and as it stands above is a marked improvement from the original but I’m now going to push it even more. I should stop with the changes I made above which to me look better than what I am about to do but now I’m going to go to insane extremes to further illustrate the kind of work I am seeing in many places on the web. Messing with all those sliders has revealed detail in what was previously just black but by doing these adjustments I’ve introduced a lot of noise and artifacts into the image. Okay so I’ll just do some noise removal … easy peasy. I now take my image into my image editing software and after doing some noise removal I also want to bring a little more detail into the image. So after I’ve done my noise removal I am going to mess some more with the highlights, shadows and midtones and I’ll do this in my image editing program by doing some manipulation on highlights, shadows and midtones contrasts, I call this “raping the shadows”. Each image editing programme has the above adjustments, some programmes call them by sligthly different names. Okay so I messed around for less than a minute and now I have the following image.

Okay so after some more manipulation of the image it's actually starting to look like something but we can still play with this some more.

Now I want to adjust the colours a little and make it look even “better” so I now mess some more with my contrasts, brightness, levels, curves and I add some more warmth using a photo warming filter and at the same time I want to try and get the sky closer to the original colour captured. Each time I’m doing changes I’m introducing noise and artifacts into the image but I can fix that in my final steps with some more noise removal. My final image which I “could” spend another hour messing with would look a whole lot better, in fact I could make make it look much much better but for the point of this tutorial I’ll stop processing now to give you an indication of what can be done with some very quick manipulation and how a really poorly exposed photograph has been turned into something better or perhaps worse looking.

The once ugly duckling now starts to actually look like something (or does it), but is it still a photograph?

To the untrained eye, a quick glance and people will saw “ooh it looks nice” but the image is filled  with imperfections now, because I pushed it past certain limits I have introduced many things that need to be fixed now. However, because I am displaying these images to you on the web at a mere 400 pixels in size it’s even easier for me to hide the MANY imperfections that have been introduced as a result of the manipulation I have done, this is another factor that bad photographers rely on, the fact that at a small resolution on the web they can make a poor image actually look ok. I’ve however over exaggerated the imperfections in these examples.

I know if I spent another hour working on this image I could make it absolutely perfect and you would hardly notice a single imperfection but …. you know what …. I’m going no further with it, this was merely to demonstrate something and personally an image like this will never make it into any of my collections nor will I even try to pass it off as a photograph and least of all as fine art. I simply keep images like to demonstrate things like this and normally anything that came out like this would end up deleted on the spot. I will rather re-shoot the scene using the proper methods to capture the scene correctly in a single frame that requires only very slight corrections which are considered acceptable.

Now when I say “acceptable” what do I mean? Well if I shoot the scene correctly using filters to hold back the exposure on the sky while getting my foreground exposed, I can do this in a single frame, I can do very minor RAW adjustments which do not involve dragging any slider more than 5-10 steps from its original setting and do not involve manipulating the image beyond what you can actually see straight out of camera. I will be able to enter the image in any leading competition (not this image of course) and when my original RAW image is requested for authentication I will not feel any worry or resistance sending the original to the judges. This is the big difference between photography and digital imaging. What I have produced above is a digital image and quite honestly no longer a photograph. I would not feel comfortable nor would I dare entering it into a competition (it’s a crap shot for a starter) nor would I try to pass it off or sell it or anything produced in a similar fashion to somebody as photography or fine art. Some competitions allow digitally manipulated images but they are few and far between.

Sadly though I see more and more photographers starting as beginners who learn to digitally rescue their bad photos and within a year they are calling themselves professionals and actually marketing and selling images produced using similar techniques as above. What’s even more worrying is that these photographers actually believe they are really good and instead of learning to take better photos they rely on snapping anything knowing they can fix it later. It’s a really bad approach to photography and does not further the art of photography and instead in my personal opinion it hurts the artform immensely. By all means there is a time and place for slightly enhancing shadow areas in an image but doing such agressive manipulations as above is not “slight” by any means.

Photography forums all over the place are filled with photographers preaching and teaching these techniques and misleading other beginners into following such methods, all this does is produce many more bad photographers who again in a very short time are trying to market and sell this nonsense as photographic art. Too many of these “photographers” have their friends, family and facebook fans telling them how wonderful their photographs are but they are also not being told the whole story of how the person “created” the image and to the untrained eyes it looks perfect but it’s so easy to spot manipulated images and the more you know about photography the easier you will spot manipulated imagery. Unfortunately once these photographers get caught in this trap of digital manipulation they seem to know it all and will simply not take criticism from a professional photographer but would rather remain blinded by the “wow” and “awesome” comments they receive from their friends and fans and as a result they will never really progress.

While they may remain blinded by the truth, I say to such photographers please don’t think that it is not possible to spot these manipulations from a mile away, it’s damn easy to spot a) when you actually know a lot about photography and b) when you have a trained eye. Stop fooling yourself that this is photography, stop relying on photoshop to fix your bad photography and actually learn to take better photos.