There has always been a lot of talk about using photoshop and digital manipulation of photographs. A lot of people think that if you do any sort of editing on your images than you are in some way cheating the viewer into seeing something that isn’t true to life. I have my own opinion on this, which is why I’m writing this blogpost.
In one way or another all photographs are edited in some way. Even with film photography, you still have to go through the dark room processes of exposing the negative onto photosensitive paper which, depending on how long you expose it for, you can get very different results, hence editing the final image.
With digital photography every time you click your shutter button, the processor in the camera has to edit the data to create the image.
Cameras also don’t see things the way the human eye sees things, in terms of dynamic range (the range of tones of light you can see) a human can see anywhere from 20 to around 24 stops of light whereas even the best camera on the market nowadays can only capture around 15 stops of light. With a cheaper point and shoot camera you may only get 8-10 stops of light. This means that when you take an image on your camera, it will probably not look like how you saw it with your naked eye. So if you wanted to make the photo look like as you saw it at the time you would have to manipulate the image in some way.
Many different photographers like to edit to varying different degrees, some like to use as little processing as possible, whereas some like to push it as far as they can. Neither way is wrong at all, seeing as photography is an art form and is subjective, there is no right way and wrong way, just different ways. If I were to edit an image one way, another photographer might edit it in a completely different way in order to get a different feel to the final image.
I generally like to edit as little as possible as I’d rather be out taking the photographs rather than sat in front of a computer editing the images. I also like to process the image depending on how I was feeling at the time of taking the photo, whether it be dark and moody or bright and happy. There are always photos that take a little more processing than others as well, normally my astro images will take a lot longer with more editing steps to make them look how I want them to look. Usually with astro photography (depending on what look you are going for) you would take more than one image and blend them together to make a final image, be it one photo for the stars and one for the foreground, or possibly many photos of just the stars in order to retrieve the details and reduce noise in the final image.