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> I do have to say that all of my shots are indeed ‘Photoshopped’. I always work on my images to make them look good on print and social media. I change contras

> I do have to say that all of my shots are indeed ‘Photoshopped’. I always work on my images to make them look good on print and social media. I change contrast, vibrance, saturation, make color adjustments, etc., so you can call them ‘fake’ in that regard. But I don’t change the moment. I guess it isn't totally clear what "fake" means. But it doesn't seem wrong to say that processing your pictures in photoshop makes them fake.

fenwick67 8y ago
Yeah, they're fake in the sense that "they're not what came out of the camera", but not in the sense that "this scene never happened".
- aaronpk 8y ago
  No picture you see is exactly what came out of the camera. As the author points out at the end of the article, if your camera outputs a jpg image, then it's already made its own decisions of how to manipulate the raw data.
  - kurtisc 8y ago
    And post-processing for the lens, or to compensate for having twice as many green sensors as red/blue.
- craigsmansion 8y ago
  I think the discrepancy lies between "this scene never happened" and "this scene was never witnessed by the human eye as such". I think one of the expectations of a photograph can be to be a reproduction of a scene as it was witnessed, not as it happened. That is, as the photographer was shooting the volcano, he never beheld the Milky way and the sea of light from the valleys that way, that only appeared in post-production. I don't necessarily think it's fake to prettify an image [1], but I can imagine why some people would consider it less than real. 1. "Pillars of Creation" looks awe inspiring in spite of: "The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen."
  - stordoff 8y ago
    I'd split into documentary-reproducing what you could witness and artistic-using photographic techniques to create a pleasing result. It's also not really post-processing - it's a choice you make at capture time. Do I leave the shutter open for (say) 1/30s to document what I'm seeing, or 5s to capture the light trails?
- Sharlin 8y ago
  You can't even see what comes out of an image sensor. The raw sensor data inevitable requires interpretation to turn it into a human-viewable image, and there exists no single canonical interpretation. That can happen in the camera, or later in a separate software, but there's no way around it.
alanfranz 8y ago
Raw images are different. Their processing is sort of arbitrary. Your camera gives you raw data about what it "sees" and you need to "anchor" such data to the real world.
zwkrt 8y ago
Does it seem wrong to say the post-processing your phone camera does makes your images fake? What about cropping a photo? Are impressionist paintings fake because they aren't photorealistic? What about Ansel Adams photos, all of which were manually burned and dodged in a lightroom? Cameras are physically incapable of capturing as wide an experience as our eyesight+mind so photographers must compensate. As a simple example, note how pictures of mountains taken with a phone always feel cheap compared to the experience of being near them. This can go too far, like making the Aurora seem as bright as the moon. On the other hand, how best to capture the awe-inspiring nature of an undulating aurora than by making it fluoresce against the night sky in your photo? If the image weren't processed then you would see nothing at all...
- kayamon 8y ago
  > Cameras are physically incapable of capturing as wide an experience as our eyesight+mind so photographers must compensate. True. > On the other hand, how best to capture the awe-inspiring nature of an undulating aurora than by making it fluoresce against the night sky in your photo? If the image weren't processed then you would see nothing at all... So what you're saying is that if you were standing where the photographer was, you wouldn't have seen this image? It required an additional creative process to bring it out? That's totally fine. That's _art_. Art is a fine thing. But if you start showing art to people and try to claim that you just snapped a normal photo, getting all upset when people claim it's unrealistic (like the article's author), you shouldn't be surprised if people call it fake.
- pishpash 8y ago
  > If the image weren't processed then you would see nothing at all... Are you saying there can never be devices that capture the vision of auroras undulating, even a neural recording? The issue with this statement is that it gives up too easily on the capturing end, and taken to an extreme it implies a dead end for photography.
dorkwood 8y ago
Your definition of fake doesn't leave a great deal of room for real photographs, though. I'm not sure there's a professional photographer alive that doesn't run their images through Photoshop or Lightroom to make final adjustments to things like white balance and contrast. A lot of smartphones do adjustments like these automatically, so that would make those fake as well.
- pishpash 8y ago
  This is true, but there is a definition that passes most people's "real" test and that is the "one-take" test, in analogy with music making. It doesn't matter what your device does for you but you commit to one take on the scene.
  - igouy 8y ago
    > the "one-take" test Except double exposure. Except 10 minute exposure time. Except… 1856-57 same sky used with 3 different seascapes: "Although Le Gray never publicly acknowledged his method, he did leave some inadvertent clues in the pictures themselves: the same spectacular stormy sky looms above the horizon in at least three different seascapes, providing irrefutable evidence of Le Gray's canny manipulation." p47 Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC&lpg=PA22&ots=L2mYNVIZO3&dq=%22the%20same%20spectacular%20stormy%20sky%20looms%20above%20the%20horizon%20in%20at%20least%20three%20different%20seascapes%2C%20providing%20irrefutable%20evidence%20of%20Le%20Gray%27s%20canny%20manipulation.%22&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=%22the%20same%20spectacular%20stormy%20sky%20looms%20above%20the%20horizon%20in%20at%20least%20three%20different%20seascapes%2C%20providing%20irrefutable%20evidence%20of%20Le%20Gray's%20canny%20manipulation.%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC&lpg=PA22&ots=...
rhn_mk1 8y ago
I think the author means "collage" or "painted" in this piece. As to manipulation in general, even the most pristine photo needs to go through demosaicing, luminance, and color balance adjustments before being shown, resulting in quite some artistic freedom. Most people don't see that, as it's usually done by the camera between the raw and "jpeg" stage. Apart from demosaicing, this is nothing new compared to the analog era though. Considering that today's cameras also do destructive operations like denoising, sharpening, and possibly tone mapping, the vast majority of photos we see are in some sense maniuplated.
pmiller2 8y ago
It means no objects are added, removed, or modified in the final image. Everything you see was there. The only thing that’s done to it is color correction, to make things look more accurate to the moment.
goblin89 8y ago
Does developing film with various unconventional methods (solutions, variable-contrast paper, etc.) mean producing ‘fake’ photos? The line I personally draw is at a point where you start to combine multiple unrelated images, while implying that the result is real. That aside, the artist captures light, and it’s up to them to make it look the way they see it. Counter-intuitively, captured light in itself carries no aesthetics. It’s up to the viewers whether the result is pleasing, but calling it ‘fake’ is something I personally really try to avoid, as it carries powerful yet subjective sentiment that can invalidate the effort in the eye of the creator.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  Is filtering the photo to turn a day shot into a night shot “fake” under your definition? It’s only using the light which exists in a single shot, so it’s not by a literal reading; yet it creates a scene which distinctly never happened, eg a certain person in a park at night. I think many people view color alterations — creating “better than real” shots — to be a similar kind of non-reality, and for those people it would be perfectly apt to call modified photos “fake”: they don’t capture the reality of anything, but are instead an imagined work — how the photographer wishes the scene looked.
  - goblin89 8y ago
    ‘Fake’ is something I could see myself using for an ostensibly documentary[0] photograph manipulated in a way that changes the moment to something no one ever perceived. A polarizing filter under right conditions can turn sky at noon into very dark shades of blue. UV pass filters let us produce landscapes that are wholly surreal with black skies and white trees. Long exposures capture light trails and rivers of light that no one sees. As to less extreme “better than real” cases, the light we see results in unique experience affected by countless factors, importantly including our preceding experiences. If a picture seems “better than real” (or better than straight out of a typical camera on default settings), perhaps it’s because that’s what the scene felt like. If it generally causes a negative reaction, perhaps it’s because the creator attempted to bite off more than they could chew in this sense. I can sympathize with distaste for certain kinds of aesthetics (for example, I might not enjoy the average look of UV or astrophotography, and I know a person or two with just generic aversion to perceived post-processing), but for me it’s about careful choice of the word and whether I can enjoy the resulting look. [0] Something that appears documentary at first might turn out to be another form of art. Whether there is purposeful misrepresentation goes beyond purely the appearance of the work, and is not black and white. It’s possible to capture a shot that uses none of pre- or post-processing, yet is misleading in a major way due to framing and context in which the picture appears.
amarshall 8y ago
There is certainly no clear definition of what “fake” is. Everything is an interpretation of the real world, from the moment it lands on the camera sensor/film. - Open a RAW file in the manufacturer software, Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, etc., and all will show something slightly different. - Different films are known for distinctive looks, which are oft emulated digitally, is one of them “real” and the other not? - Sensors and films tend to have more limited dynamic range than our eyes, does that make normal photos more “fake” and certain HDR photos more “real”? A photograph straight-out-of-the-camera might actually be less faithful to the real scene than a processed one. National Geographic has some reasonably sensible guidelines on processing/manipulation for submitted photos, but there’s still plenty of vague lines between faithful and unfaithful.[1] To me, it’s mostly: did the composite parts of this photo all happen in the same location at around the same time such that if a human was there they would have seen those moments? [1] https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/photo-guidelines/ https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/photo-guidelines/
bitcurious 8y ago
I agree with you. There are generally speaking two goals of corrective photo manipulation. One is compensating for the limitations of the camera - i.e. perhaps you underexposed to capture motion and then changed the levels to make the photo look closer to what you saw. The other is compensating for the limitations of the scene - i.e. using a long exposure to capture something that's unseen to the human eye. Based on the example photos I think he's doing the latter.
skookumchuck 8y ago
Even the selection of lense and film alters the photo.

fenwick67 8y ago

Yeah, they're fake in the sense that "they're not what came out of the camera", but not in the sense that "this scene never happened".

aaronpk 8y ago
No picture you see is exactly what came out of the camera. As the author points out at the end of the article, if your camera outputs a jpg image, then it's already made its own decisions of how to manipulate the raw data.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  And post-processing for the lens, or to compensate for having twice as many green sensors as red/blue.
craigsmansion 8y ago
I think the discrepancy lies between "this scene never happened" and "this scene was never witnessed by the human eye as such". I think one of the expectations of a photograph can be to be a reproduction of a scene as it was witnessed, not as it happened. That is, as the photographer was shooting the volcano, he never beheld the Milky way and the sea of light from the valleys that way, that only appeared in post-production. I don't necessarily think it's fake to prettify an image [1], but I can imagine why some people would consider it less than real. 1. "Pillars of Creation" looks awe inspiring in spite of: "The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen."
- stordoff 8y ago
  I'd split into documentary-reproducing what you could witness and artistic-using photographic techniques to create a pleasing result. It's also not really post-processing - it's a choice you make at capture time. Do I leave the shutter open for (say) 1/30s to document what I'm seeing, or 5s to capture the light trails?
Sharlin 8y ago
You can't even see what comes out of an image sensor. The raw sensor data inevitable requires interpretation to turn it into a human-viewable image, and there exists no single canonical interpretation. That can happen in the camera, or later in a separate software, but there's no way around it.

alanfranz 8y ago

Raw images are different. Their processing is sort of arbitrary. Your camera gives you raw data about what it "sees" and you need to "anchor" such data to the real world.

zwkrt 8y ago

Does it seem wrong to say the post-processing your phone camera does makes your images fake? What about cropping a photo? Are impressionist paintings fake because they aren't photorealistic? What about Ansel Adams photos, all of which were manually burned and dodged in a lightroom? Cameras are physically incapable of capturing as wide an experience as our eyesight+mind so photographers must compensate. As a simple example, note how pictures of mountains taken with a phone always feel cheap compared to the experience of being near them. This can go too far, like making the Aurora seem as bright as the moon. On the other hand, how best to capture the awe-inspiring nature of an undulating aurora than by making it fluoresce against the night sky in your photo? If the image weren't processed then you would see nothing at all...

kayamon 8y ago
> Cameras are physically incapable of capturing as wide an experience as our eyesight+mind so photographers must compensate. True. > On the other hand, how best to capture the awe-inspiring nature of an undulating aurora than by making it fluoresce against the night sky in your photo? If the image weren't processed then you would see nothing at all... So what you're saying is that if you were standing where the photographer was, you wouldn't have seen this image? It required an additional creative process to bring it out? That's totally fine. That's _art_. Art is a fine thing. But if you start showing art to people and try to claim that you just snapped a normal photo, getting all upset when people claim it's unrealistic (like the article's author), you shouldn't be surprised if people call it fake.
pishpash 8y ago
> If the image weren't processed then you would see nothing at all... Are you saying there can never be devices that capture the vision of auroras undulating, even a neural recording? The issue with this statement is that it gives up too easily on the capturing end, and taken to an extreme it implies a dead end for photography.

dorkwood 8y ago

Your definition of fake doesn't leave a great deal of room for real photographs, though. I'm not sure there's a professional photographer alive that doesn't run their images through Photoshop or Lightroom to make final adjustments to things like white balance and contrast. A lot of smartphones do adjustments like these automatically, so that would make those fake as well.

pishpash 8y ago
This is true, but there is a definition that passes most people's "real" test and that is the "one-take" test, in analogy with music making. It doesn't matter what your device does for you but you commit to one take on the scene.
- igouy 8y ago
  > the "one-take" test Except double exposure. Except 10 minute exposure time. Except… 1856-57 same sky used with 3 different seascapes: "Although Le Gray never publicly acknowledged his method, he did leave some inadvertent clues in the pictures themselves: the same spectacular stormy sky looms above the horizon in at least three different seascapes, providing irrefutable evidence of Le Gray's canny manipulation." p47 Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC&lpg=PA22&ots=L2mYNVIZO3&dq=%22the%20same%20spectacular%20stormy%20sky%20looms%20above%20the%20horizon%20in%20at%20least%20three%20different%20seascapes%2C%20providing%20irrefutable%20evidence%20of%20Le%20Gray%27s%20canny%20manipulation.%22&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=%22the%20same%20spectacular%20stormy%20sky%20looms%20above%20the%20horizon%20in%20at%20least%20three%20different%20seascapes%2C%20providing%20irrefutable%20evidence%20of%20Le%20Gray's%20canny%20manipulation.%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC&lpg=PA22&ots=...

rhn_mk1 8y ago

I think the author means "collage" or "painted" in this piece. As to manipulation in general, even the most pristine photo needs to go through demosaicing, luminance, and color balance adjustments before being shown, resulting in quite some artistic freedom. Most people don't see that, as it's usually done by the camera between the raw and "jpeg" stage. Apart from demosaicing, this is nothing new compared to the analog era though. Considering that today's cameras also do destructive operations like denoising, sharpening, and possibly tone mapping, the vast majority of photos we see are in some sense maniuplated.

pmiller2 8y ago

It means no objects are added, removed, or modified in the final image. Everything you see was there. The only thing that’s done to it is color correction, to make things look more accurate to the moment.

goblin89 8y ago

Does developing film with various unconventional methods (solutions, variable-contrast paper, etc.) mean producing ‘fake’ photos? The line I personally draw is at a point where you start to combine multiple unrelated images, while implying that the result is real. That aside, the artist captures light, and it’s up to them to make it look the way they see it. Counter-intuitively, captured light in itself carries no aesthetics. It’s up to the viewers whether the result is pleasing, but calling it ‘fake’ is something I personally really try to avoid, as it carries powerful yet subjective sentiment that can invalidate the effort in the eye of the creator.

FakeComments 8y ago
Is filtering the photo to turn a day shot into a night shot “fake” under your definition? It’s only using the light which exists in a single shot, so it’s not by a literal reading; yet it creates a scene which distinctly never happened, eg a certain person in a park at night. I think many people view color alterations — creating “better than real” shots — to be a similar kind of non-reality, and for those people it would be perfectly apt to call modified photos “fake”: they don’t capture the reality of anything, but are instead an imagined work — how the photographer wishes the scene looked.
- goblin89 8y ago
  ‘Fake’ is something I could see myself using for an ostensibly documentary[0] photograph manipulated in a way that changes the moment to something no one ever perceived. A polarizing filter under right conditions can turn sky at noon into very dark shades of blue. UV pass filters let us produce landscapes that are wholly surreal with black skies and white trees. Long exposures capture light trails and rivers of light that no one sees. As to less extreme “better than real” cases, the light we see results in unique experience affected by countless factors, importantly including our preceding experiences. If a picture seems “better than real” (or better than straight out of a typical camera on default settings), perhaps it’s because that’s what the scene felt like. If it generally causes a negative reaction, perhaps it’s because the creator attempted to bite off more than they could chew in this sense. I can sympathize with distaste for certain kinds of aesthetics (for example, I might not enjoy the average look of UV or astrophotography, and I know a person or two with just generic aversion to perceived post-processing), but for me it’s about careful choice of the word and whether I can enjoy the resulting look. [0] Something that appears documentary at first might turn out to be another form of art. Whether there is purposeful misrepresentation goes beyond purely the appearance of the work, and is not black and white. It’s possible to capture a shot that uses none of pre- or post-processing, yet is misleading in a major way due to framing and context in which the picture appears.

amarshall 8y ago

There is certainly no clear definition of what “fake” is. Everything is an interpretation of the real world, from the moment it lands on the camera sensor/film. - Open a RAW file in the manufacturer software, Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, etc., and all will show something slightly different. - Different films are known for distinctive looks, which are oft emulated digitally, is one of them “real” and the other not? - Sensors and films tend to have more limited dynamic range than our eyes, does that make normal photos more “fake” and certain HDR photos more “real”? A photograph straight-out-of-the-camera might actually be less faithful to the real scene than a processed one. National Geographic has some reasonably sensible guidelines on processing/manipulation for submitted photos, but there’s still plenty of vague lines between faithful and unfaithful.[1] To me, it’s mostly: did the composite parts of this photo all happen in the same location at around the same time such that if a human was there they would have seen those moments? [1] https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/photo-guidelines/ https://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/photo-guidelines/

bitcurious 8y ago

I agree with you. There are generally speaking two goals of corrective photo manipulation. One is compensating for the limitations of the camera - i.e. perhaps you underexposed to capture motion and then changed the levels to make the photo look closer to what you saw. The other is compensating for the limitations of the scene - i.e. using a long exposure to capture something that's unseen to the human eye. Based on the example photos I think he's doing the latter.

skookumchuck 8y ago

Even the selection of lense and film alters the photo.