This Photographer Shares His Edited Photos To Show How Much Online Images Are Photoshopped (29 pics)

Of course photographers use Photoshop. A photographer takes advantage of all available tools to create an image that matches her vision. This is no different than how a painter creates an image. Photography is a creative art and we use composition tools and color to create our final image. Now when we choose to factually document something we take care to present “the truth”. We’ve seen examples of unethically “shopped” images used to depict actual events in the news (yes - some by Americans). Other than that and specific competition rules, the photographer should have the freedom to create how he felt.about what he saw.

"If a little adjustment is good, a lot must be even better!" While the original looks bad, the "fixed" version is bad in other ways.

See how much better things can be when you exercise a little restraint?

This is just fixing exposure problems.

Once in a hundred year sky! Way oversaturated and gaudy.

Cut back on the blue in sky and water for realism.

Sky has much improved—green, over-saturated a little.

Tone down saturation.

Everything works except the sky, which doesn't look like anything approaching reality.

Not too bad.

Unrealistic.

He nailed the lighting out of the box, & lost it with the edit.

Less saturation. Colors are much better.

Too orange.

Fixing exposure problems

HDR is the quick way to make a photo look fake. Non-photographers make think they like it, but photographers cringe. If you're using this much HDR, you aren't a photographer, you're a picture-taker.

Some of these photo's were "over the top". BUT most of them were simply compensating for limitations of photographic equipment. Petestew shows some good examples of this when he shows the "bracket" photos. Each bracket photo looks dull and washed out, but combine them and it looks much more like what a human eye can see.

Green needs to be toned down some. The same with the blue water.

Greens are a different shade and not realistic. Sky is much better but overdone.

Good, but tone down the green in the foreground a little.

Walls unrealistic. Need to be desaturated.

Weird colors!

Just too strong.

Unrealistically gaudy.

Sky needs to much darker for night time

Totally ruins the point of the photo - the beautiful negative space

Grey in buildings more realistic.

Say it 50 times: less is more!