About Digital Image Processing

Often times when I am showing my work, people ask me how I create my images. In the past they were referring to what camera gear I use or how long I expose the film. However, in this digital age, what many people are really asking is what kinds of manipulation do I perform on my computer to “artificially” alter the colors, backgrounds, or textures of the scenes. The a priori judgment is that if you process images using a computer then you must be "faking" the images in some way.

First lets clear something up. Manipulating photos did not suddenly arrive with the advent of digital technology. People have been fiddling with their images for many many years. Double exposures, layering negatives, filters in every imaginable color and texture, chemical toning, you name it and someone has probably done it to a photo with nary a computer in sight. Digital technology certainly has made manipulations easier to do and has removed the barrier of requiring specialized skills and possibly expensive hardware so that now anyone with a PC and a few bucks to spend on software can join in the fun - but all these shenanigans are nothing new.

The choice of when, where, and how much image manipulation to use has always and will always lie with the individual photographer and not in the tools themselves.

I believe that the distrust of digital image processing comes not from what can be done, but instead that it can be done so well that it cannot be detected. No one likes to be made a fool. When I encounter a work, I interact with it. I "appreciate" it. Part of my appreciation (especially with natural scenes) often comes from my belief that what I'm seeing actually exists. I can enjoy not only the beauty of the image itself, but I can also tap into the primordial sense of comfort, enjoyment, fear, or excitement  that nature variously stirs in a human soul.

To find out afterward that the mist filling that valley wasn't really there at all or that the bright red autumn foliage on that tree was actually dull brown or maybe that the tree wasn't even standing there in front of that mountain, it was pasted in from some other shot and by the way so was that full moon in the background. That's a shock. I feel that the artist has lied to me.

So my thought is - if you want to mess with your images, by all means knock yourself out. It 's your call as the artist. Just be sure to tell me about it upfront. Make the sky green and the grass blue for all I care. I'll take the image for what it is, just don't try to pull the wool over my eyes.

So where do I personally draw the line when processing my images?

I take a conservative approach to my photography. As I said before, I think that this is especially important since I claim to be a "nature photographer". I want to use my skills and techniques to illuminate the inherent beauty of nature; not overshadow it.

I do as much upfront with the camera as I can rather than relying on software to do things on the backend. I like being in the woods and taking pictures not sitting in my office staring at a computer screen trying to "fix" a poorly shot image.

So I spend a lot of time fiddling with each shot - getting the right angle - shifting my position to get the scene from its "good side". I zoom in, zoom out, change lenses, speed up the shutter or slow it down, wait for the sun to come out from behind a cloud or maybe wait for it to go under. I use a polarizing filter to cut the glare off the surface of the water or maybe I remove the filter in order to capture the reflection of the blue sky. I don't use many of the whiz-bang features of my digital camera. I prefer to do my own light metering and rely on exposure bracketing and I do my own focusing.

When I get home and start processing my photos, I make gentle adjustments to exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights, and shadows. I crop some images (although it pains me to lose pixels that way). I adjust the color balance only so far as to remove any tints applied by the camera when it incorrectly reads the temperature of the light.

I use a pretty low end image editing software package that currently costs less than a hundred bucks and I don’t even use a fraction of the features it provides. I never cut out blank grey skies and replace them with puffy white clouds. I never slice my images into layers, fiddle with the colors, and recombine them into “false color” images. I don’t combine elements from multiple photos. I don’t add textures or paint effects or fake mist. Once in a blue moon I will convert to grayscale, but I’m just not a monochrome kind of person so I don’t do it much.

Using a digital camera eliminates a lot of the dust spots and scratches that used to go along with film. Still, I drag my camera equipment through the woods for miles, up and down hills, through water, in all kinds of weather. Dust and dirt and water get all over it. This stuff always seems to show up on the images no matter how often I break out the cleaning papers. This is where the clone tool comes into play.

I use the clone tool sparingly. I remove spots and lines caused by crud on the optics of the camera. Sometimes there is the odd shiny spot on a wet rock or pinpricks of bright light between some branches that are distracting to the overall image – I’ll clone these out. On the other hand I have never found it useful to try and remove large objects like entire tree branches or tripod legs or power lines from my images. I just relegate those shots to the reject pile and vow to be more careful with my framing next time.

The final step is sharpening. I like nice sharp edges – no soft focus effects for me. My goal is to sharpen enough without going so far as to distort or degrade the image. This is always a tricky step.

That’s about it – nothing too fancy.

So if you look at some of my images and you think I must have artificially altered the colors or added textures or something, let me assure you that it ain’t so. Nature is just weird like that sometimes.

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