I found this pretty depressing

jerry12953

jerry12953

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Jeremy Moore
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I'm probably not the only photographer to have received this junk email ad for sky replacement software.

The slogans include the following -

"Always have beautiful skies...."

"With the killer App for Sky Replacement and our new Skies and Clouds Collections"

With [..............] sky replacement is no longer like Rocket Science"

"Add Skies III and our amazing new Drag and Drop Cloud Formations and the skies the limit on creativity!"

It goes on and on like this. I just find it depressing I'm afraid. It used to be possible to believe that what we were seeing in an image was real but it gets more and more difficult. Another problem will be that if you do manage to get a great sky in your image people will believe it's fake!
 
If you look at most professional images they are in a sense fake anyway. Using post-processing is all that's being done here and we do that all the time even if it's just a crop or boosting saturation etc. I don't look at photos to see if they're fake. I look at photos to see if they're good and creative and eye catching etc. If people want to call your photos fake whether they are or not then you can be happy in the knowledge that they're probably just jealous because you've created a masterpiece.

The people that will use that type of program are people that can't use their camera to create the same or better photos. You don't need to worry about those people. :)
 
To answer your first point, they're only fake in the sense that either the camera has processed the files for you or you've converted the RAW files into something that you're happy with. I call that processing and it's akin to what people did in the darkroom in the days of film, and it's one of the biggest benefits of digital.

I know it was always possible to create a print from a sandwich of negs or transparencies but that was the realm of the specialist. Now you can buy software with a built in library of skies from god knows where which is specifically designed to cobble together fake images. I won't use the word create because I don't believe that doing this is a creative act.

Another nail in the coffin of art of the photographer?
 
I don't see how. There is more to a good photo than a deep blue sky odds are if you drop a clear sky into a photograph taken on a cloudy day it'll look wrong any way, shadows will be wrong for a start. But if the photographer wants to manipulate the photo in any way that's up to them they might even want that jarring wrongness.
 
jerry12953 said:
I won't use the word create because I don't believe that doing this is a creative act.
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I dont see how this isnt being creative. Surely if the 'artist' is creating an image, even if all of the elements are cobbled together from numerous sources, its still a creative process, is it not? The artist is still realising the image they have in their minds.
 
It's one thing to use a sky that you shot yourself, and quite another to use an off-the-peg sky. I suppose the next step is a library of foregrounds so you can mix and match with the skies!
 
Ed Sutton said:
It's one thing to use a sky that you shot yourself, and quite another to use an off-the-peg sky. I suppose the next step is a library of foregrounds so you can mix and match with the skies!
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Why? That seems a slightly arbitrary distinction it is just a sky.

Not try to pick a fight, but I am curious to your reasoning?
 
Ed Sutton said:
It's one thing to use a sky that you shot yourself, and quite another to use an off-the-peg sky. I suppose the next step is a library of foregrounds so you can mix and match with the skies!
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Personally I would never mix and match parts of images even if I had taken them all myself.

But take it to its logical conclusion and the photographer can just re-arrange foregrounds, backgrounds, and subject matter of any kind that he's downloaded off the internet. But that's not photography any more . Is it?

Where do you draw the line?

Nikon_Nick said:
I dont see how this isnt being creative. Surely if the 'artist' is creating an image, even if all of the elements are cobbled together from numerous sources, its still a creative process, is it not? The artist is still realising the image they have in their minds.
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Good point. There are very fine distinctions to be made here, but I still wouldn't call creative.
 
jerry12953 said:
Personally I would never mix and match parts of images even if I had taken them all myself.

But take it to its logical conclusion and the photographer can just re-arrange foregrounds, backgrounds, and subject matter of any kind that he's downloaded off the internet. But that's not photography any more . Is it?

Where do you draw the line?



Good point. There are very fine distinctions to be made here, but I still wouldn't call creative.
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Same here i would not call it photography any more (n)
 
Photography has always been a multi-part discipline, and composing the image in the viewfinder & then pressing the shutter release was only ever the first part of the process. Sure this is making combining images easier, but it's only the 'easier', rather than taking over. There's no purism in photography, although one can be restricted by the rules of certain competitions to have not used more than a single image to create the final picture due to the subject required.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Photography has always been a multi-part discipline, and composing the image in the viewfinder & then pressing the shutter release was only ever the first part of the process. Sure this is making combining images easier, but it's only the 'easier', rather than taking over. There's no purism in photography, although one can be restricted by the rules of certain competitions to have not used more than a single image to create the final picture due to the subject required.
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I've always thought that a photograph has a direct link with reality, though.

I've no idea how well this software works, but if it does, the skill in making the final image partly depends on the skill of the software designer.
 
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I think for many years the competent photographer who has mastered Photoshop has taken his photography to levels most of us can only aspire to. It's defensive thinking to believe it all happens 'in camera' Of course the gifted photographer with 'the eye' will always produce fantastic images without post processing skills.

Never under estimate where the best digital image manipulators can take the average image.
 
badlywornroy said:
Of course the gifted photographer with 'the eye' will always produce fantastic images without post processing skills.
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But fantastic landscape images with amazing skies actually need amazing skies in reality. An amazing sky from a software package is a cheap shortcut. My worry is that the software designers are actually so good that it will be difficult or impossible to tell whether the sky is real or not.
 
Ed Sutton said:
It's one thing to use a sky that you shot yourself, and quite another to use an off-the-peg sky. I suppose the next step is a library of foregrounds so you can mix and match with the skies!
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A photographic version of those children's books where you can swap heads, bodies and legs around except with sky, backgrounds and foregrounds. Mix and match until you get a picture you like!


Steve.
 
Ed Sutton said:
Why not paste in some hair you've found on-line when making a portrait? After all, it's just hair. :D
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It also takes more than great hair to make a good portrait but if the photographer thinks that will improve their photo who are you or I to get involved.

The camera lies. Photoshop makes it easier to tell bigger, less believable lies.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Photography has always been a multi-part discipline, and composing the image in the viewfinder & then pressing the shutter release was only ever the first part of the process. Sure this is making combining images easier, but it's only the 'easier', rather than taking over. There's no purism in photography, although one can be restricted by the rules of certain competitions to have not used more than a single image to create the final picture due to the subject required.
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Of course their is purism in photographer,its up to you if you wish not to do your photographer that way :)
 
It is a matter of degree and personal view. There are folks who are happy to straghten, crop, adjust levels, tweak the colours a bit and sometimes clone parts of a photo, others will do anything to get an image they want.

It may be because I take more landscapes than anything else and I want my shots to be a fairly faithful record of what I have seen, that I'm in the first camp. Therefore I agree, Jeremy. Pasting in a sky is, IMO, a step too far, but if done well, we would probably never notice, though Steven's point about the sky and foreground having to work together is valid; I cam imagine some horeendous images appearing on social media.

However, could the logical conclusion be the saving of the planet? Why spend all that money and pump loads of greenhouse gases in to the atmosphere by flying to exotic places on holiday when you can just paste yourself in to a scene from anywhere and add a great sky?

Dave
 
steveo_mcg said:
It also takes more than great hair to make a good portrait but if the photographer thinks that will improve their photo who are you or I to get involved.

The camera lies. Photoshop makes it easier to tell bigger, less believable lies.
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It really comes down to your personal definition of what constitutes a photograph, and the differentiation between a photograph and a photographic image. I have no problem with photographs being manipulated any way people want, but don't expect me to call them photographs.

This is just my personal take on the matter. YMMV as they say.:)
 
simonblue said:
Of course their is purism in photographer,its up to you if you wish not to do your photographer that way :)
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I'm not doing anything to photographers - clean living, happily married chap, me. ;)

But seriously - every time you use a digital camera you already accept the software adjustments the manufacturer designed in, and when you shoot film then your output is controlled by the way the film maker determined their film would behave. It isn't purism to abdicate responsibility and control to someone else. *personally* I'd probably draw the line at using someone else's sky in a picture if that sky were the dominant feature, but if it made the difference between an otherwise great image with a boring strip of sky going in the bin or being fit for the wall, then I'd go hunting through my images for a suitable sky to use.

jerry12953 said:
But fantastic landscape images with amazing skies actually need amazing skies in reality. An amazing sky from a software package is a cheap shortcut. My worry is that the software designers are actually so good that it will be difficult or impossible to tell whether the sky is real or not.
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And while I half agree, after a bit we'd start seeing images with identical skies, and that would give the game away. :) But seriously, it shouldn't matter whether the designers are that good or not: what should matter is whether you can get great images working the way you want to, and if you can't then you either need to up your game or get better with the software.


Again, on a personal note, 2 weeks ago I made my first proper composite image because I wanted to capture a sunset over a rapeseed field. To me, it's a real photograph, shot entirely by me for this specific purpose and appearance, and deliberately designed to create an image that was impossible in camera. It's not a 'great' image, but it's a stage in the learning process, and each time it will be better until people will want to ask "how did you do that?".
 
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I just have this nagging feeling that it's not just a case of "Well....it's up to the individual whether they do such and such or not......"

Is there not a hint of right or wrong in this debate? For me there's a good reason why the competitions referred to above refuse to accept composite images.

Because they aren't real photographs.

This software must be aimed partly at designers and graphics professionals. They can sit at their Macs with a lousy landscape image which they picked up for a pittance, and drop a brilliant sky in.

Landscape photographers? Who needs 'em?
 
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jerry12953 said:
I'm probably not the only photographer to have received this junk email ad for sky replacement software.

The slogans include the following -

"Always have beautiful skies...."

"With the killer App for Sky Replacement and our new Skies and Clouds Collections"

With [..............] sky replacement is no longer like Rocket Science"

"Add Skies III and our amazing new Drag and Drop Cloud Formations and the skies the limit on creativity!"

It goes on and on like this. I just find it depressing I'm afraid. It used to be possible to believe that what we were seeing in an image was real but it gets more and more difficult. Another problem will be that if you do manage to get a great sky in your image people will believe it's fake!
Click to expand...

Delete it... forget it.. move on.

Great photography doesn't come from software.
 
There are certainly some people in this debate who see composite images as fundamentally wrong, and others who just see them as images. In the case of LPOTY type competitions, there are some very sound reasons for those rules within the nature of the competition, but outside of that setting there is no ethical reason composite images should not be admired as much as those based on a single original image.

As for graphic designers combining images, they are, by definition, not photographers in that role, and it's unlikely they will be presenting those images as their own photographs.
 
Is the person who pays to build a controlled environment (studio), arranges the background / context to the shot by removing superfluous elements from the studio, sets and controls the lighting, smooths and evens out the skin of the model through use of a MUA, accentuates the shape of the model with use of tape, clips, poses etc more or less creative than another person who achieves most of this through post processing?

We'd tend to give more credence to the first person typically - that's a *real* photographer, but in reality they've used the skills of others (builders, MUA etc) to supplement their own. Is the second person any less skilled? They've used the skills of software designers to supplement theirs, so are they simply not just following a different, back loaded workflow? Sure it's a different set of skills to the first person, but are they 'less worthy'.
 
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ancient_mariner said:
There are certainly some people in this debate who see composite images as fundamentally wrong,
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You'll always get that though. I have nothing against composite images at all. I do many of them. Usually for a reason though. I'd prefer to NOT have to composite an image, but the last time I did it, it's because to create what I needed, I'd need to get a model in a rather cumbersome costume halfway up a scottish mountain in pitch darkness, and have her stand absolutely still for 40 seconds every time I need to make an exposure. Sod that. Composite it is.

The results matter.

The fact is though, shooting for composite is not easy, nor is it something that you can just use an "App" to do for you. Shooting for composite requires a great deal of skill and requires a deep understanding of lighting in order to make the components match.


Whacking on a different sky just to make your crap images less crap though.... that's just pathetic.

jerry12953 said:
This software must be aimed partly at designers and graphics professionals. They can sit at their Macs with a lousy landscape image which they picked up for a pittance, and drop a brilliant sky in.

Landscape photographers? Who needs 'em?
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But they can't. That would look sh1t.


What annoys me about all this though, and conversations like this, is why do amateurs get all bothered about it? Why all the debate over whether it's "right" or "wrong"? It's a way of working - nothing more, nothing less. What is there to discuss? I'm a bit puzzled why some people chose to do it when it's not necessary though... I mean, as someone who has often worked in such a way, it's actually far more work than just taking a photograph.
 
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People have a delusion that photography is 'real life'. I'm afraid it's not. A photograph is not reality (arguably it's a version of a reality!), whether printed from film or digitally produced. You are interpreting reality by the angle you choose to shoot at, the composition in the frame, the time of day, the weather, the exposure, the depth of field etc etc etc.

Anyone who doesn't agree with the photographic medium changing to include new techniques, I presume you make all of your images with a pin hole and some light sensitive chemicals?
 
I suppose there are some (many?) areas of photography where it really doesn't matter if an image is cobbled together or not, such as that David (Furtim) describes above. I was once up in Snowdonia when I chanced upon a shoot for a lorry manufacturer (or perhaps it was a haulage firm) which involved a lorry driving up and down a road with a mountain in the background. I couldn't believe how many people were involved..... even the driver had a personal make-up assistant. (Or maybe I made that bit up). I suppose they could have combined a couple or more images and it might well have been easier. And it wouldn't have mattered. It was for an ad and we probably all understand that more or less everything in ad-land is fake.

I know I've gone on about this before but in landscape photography I believe truth to subject matter is important. I really, really want and need to know if what I see before me is real or fake. Since the dawn of photography - with important exceptions - there has been a direct link between image and subject matter. There is documentary value in a landscape image unless it has been cobbled together. Software such as this just seems to me to make the process of fakery so much easier.
 
gibtheo said:
Short answer, it's all 'fake'. It is all an interpretation of someones reality. :)
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Steven, you've just joined this discussion. Have you read any of it? Have you any idea what you're talking about?

Whatever the answer, I suggest you read, think, and consider before making such silly comments.
 
gibtheo said:
Short answer, it's all 'fake'. It is all an interpretation of someones reality. :)
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jerry12953 said:
Steven, you've just joined this discussion. Have you read any of it? Have you any idea what you're talking about?

Whatever the answer, I suggest you read, think, and consider before making such silly comments.
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Except he is right. The only truth in a photograph is what the photographer has chosen to include. There is a Joe Corninsh shot of wild Scottish landscapes which he readily admits was shot from the side of the A9.
 
In my opinion (and it is just an opinion), I believe that someone can't take a photo of a scene and 'drop in' parts from a different scene or location and call it a 'photograph'. However if for example someone took a photo of a mountain scene on a dull day that had some great subjects passing through, and then went back to take a photograph of the same scene with a better sky, and mixed the two then yes, it is the still a photograph. That being said, if someone wants to take photos from totally separate locations or download stock stuff and mix it all together (which is still okay in my books) it is then stepping into the world of fantasy and becomes a different form of art similar to that of impressionism and that of paintings not traditional photography.
 
steveo_mcg said:
Except he is right. The only truth in a photograph is what the photographer has chosen to include. There is a Joe Corninsh shot of wild Scottish landscapes which he readily admits was shot from the side of the A9.
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That viewpoint is well photographed and well-known, exactly because it's right next to the A9. Presumably Joe Cornish didn't get a sky from a sky collection and combine it with his image of the stream and the mountain, though.

The "everything in photography is fake" argument has been well and often used but in my opinion does not hold water. I agree that the photographer makes selections and interpretations at all stages of the process but there is a quantum leap between that and getting a sky off the internet or a software program and combining it with his own image to produce a result. The latter I call fake, the former is not.
 
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jerry12953 said:
That viewpoint is well photographed and well-known, exactly because it's right next to the A9. Presumably Joe Cornish didn't get a sky from a sky collection and combine it with his image of the stream and the mountain, though.

The "everything in photography is fake" argument has been well and often used but in my opinion does not hold water. I agree that the photographer makes selections and interpretations at all stages of the process but there is a quantum leap between that and getting a sky off the internet or a software program and combining it with his own image to produce a result. The latter I call fake, the former is not.
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You might know its not been shot from rugged wilderness but your average punter is not to know and if Mr Cornish didn't mention it few would be any the wiser. And even if this was a composite would you be able to tell? Short of going round to his place and seeing the transparency you only have his word and that of his publisher that he was even there and that is how the light was at the time. If he shot digital at the time odds are you would not even get that "proof" since the original raw file may be long gone.

Have you shot any landscapes? If you have then you'll know you simply dropping a sky into a photo will not improve it and why do you care if that is what makes others happy?
 
A photograph is just an image that has involved a camera somewhere along the way. A lot of the landscapes I take are nothing like the view I see in front of me, and that is with very little post processing.

As far as I am concerned it is the final image that is important. Is it good, crap, great, a masterpiece? Does it say what I wanted to say? Would you say the same about a painter who paints a landscape that wasn't actually what he saw in front of him by using subjects from various locations and moving things around? A camera is just a tool. Software is just a tool. Whatever you need to create the vision you wanted to share is what matters, not how you did it.

As far as this software goes, so what? As has been said, it will be unlikely to produce an image that would be considered great but if it does, then well done to the person who used it.
 
YoshiK1 said:
If you look at most professional images they are in a sense fake anyway. Using post-processing is all that's being done here and we do that all the time even if it's just a crop or boosting saturation etc. I don't look at photos to see if they're fake. I look at photos to see if they're good and creative and eye catching etc. If people want to call your photos fake whether they are or not then you can be happy in the knowledge that they're probably just jealous because you've created a masterpiece.

The people that will use that type of program are people that can't use their camera to create the same or better photos. You don't need to worry about those people. :)
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Post processing doesn't make it "fake" if you're simply bringing out detail that's already there, shot and taken by yourself in that frame.

Manipulation and cutting and pasting is completely different IMO.

I agree with the OP. I find a lot of amateur apps and things like this really dumb down and devalue photography. As I said in a post a while back, I was asked (on facebook) what app I used to blur the background on a particular shot. I then posted up a photo of my 35mm f/2. They didn't understand my reply... It shouldn't have bothered me, but it did :(
 
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