This Photographer Shares His Edited Photos To Show How Much Online Images Are Photoshopped (30 pics)
Taking a good picture isn't easy. Taking an awesome picture is even harder. And taking an impossible picture is, well, impossible. Unless you use Photoshop that is.
Peter Stewart is an internationally published photographer with thousands of followers and millions of views. He's also a wizard with Photoshop, and you can see from these revealing before and after pictures just what sort of difference some clever editing can make.
More info: Peter Stewart | 500px | Instagram | Flickr | (h/t: demilked, PetaPixel)
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HDR bracketing manually blended in Photoshop. Nik color efex pro used for post-production.
“I like to approach my digital photography with a certain sense of the fantastical and the surreal,” Stewart told PetaPixel. He uses a technique called bracketed multiple exposure, which allows him to retain highlight details from different photographs before stacking them together into one picture.
“These before and after samples are simply meant to highlight what can be done with the power of Photoshop,' says Stewart. "As such, I have deliberately provided the most dramatic examples.”
A camera can only guess the white balance, the settings for a "good" exposure, color saturation, the intention of the photographer, etc. In the end it's all subjective and our eyes and brains do much more "filtering" than the cameras anyways - remember your last awesome sunset and took a picture? that picture likely won't look as good as you remember it was... There's a rough common sense what's visually pleasing and that's what post-processing tries to achieve. Thus there's also no such thing as #nofilter.
Peter Stewart, a skilled photographer, mainly relies on his Nikon D810 for a bulk of his work, attributing its use to its remarkable resolution and the broad latitude it offers for editing raw files. Recently, he has also begun using the Fuji X100f as his secondary, handheld camera for capturing spontaneous scenes during his travels.
Perspective re-correction and power line removal in photoshop. Color enhancements using color efex pro.
His love for street photography is perfectly met by the compact and handy Ricoh GR, while he saves his more bulky DSLR setup for occasions when he's typically tripod based and has a pre-planned setup in mind.
Being a full-time traveller, every piece of equipment that Stewart carries has a weight implication, making minimal lens weight a top priority for him. He generally relies on the Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 & Nikon 70-200 f/4 zooms as his primary optics to cover a wide to tele focal ranges.
For ultra-wide scenes and architecture, his preferred lens is the Samyang 14mm f/2.8 prime. Stewart praises this lens for being an affordable, low-cost, and lightweight option that easily matches the optical quality of many other more expensive wide-angle primes.
Gradual orange sky gradient and color adjustments were performed in adobe camera raw. Sunrays created in photoshop, with an added glow.
Prefer the first photo, it's calming the second looks like a dragon is going to jump out at any second
First one looks too ominous but it surely is better than the edited one.
Load More Replies...Overexposed image with detail brought back using camera raw. Nik color efex pro used for post-production color.
Why do all pics have to look like a nightmare from Technicolour? Most are amazing as they are instead of chaotic colour mix.
Various sky adjustments were performed in Photoshop. Nik color efex pro was used for post-production color enhancements.
I like the fact you can see the person with the net better in the second one but, don't know why they had to mess with the sky.
Nik color efex pro used for post-production color enhancements.
Tonal adjustments were made using nik color efex pro. Composite sky blended into the frame manually.
HDR bracketing composited using photoshop's 'merge to HDR'. Nik color efex pro used for post-production
Note: this post originally had 46 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
To be honest, although the finished photos are beautiful to look at, once we've reached this point, I feel it's no longer "photography" as you're no longer capturing a moment or angle or degree of light. You're using a photograph simply as the basis for a digital artwork, and believe me: I like digital art. I think the photoshopped artwork here is beautiful. But it's not photography. Those images aren't real anymore, and it's no longer just tweaking the light a bit or bringing out the color, but reimagining the whole scene.
Exactly, a bit of tweaking (brightness, contrast etc) it's very useful for photography, but this is indeed digital art.
Load More Replies...This guy is just a very poor photographer. The originals are mostly under-exposed, presumably by just letting the camera do everything for them. Sure, the end results may be stunning, but a real professional photographer should be able to capture the image as it is without resorting to post-processing.
Actually no, a good photographer knows the limits of the sensor and exposes in a way that the best result can be achieved in editing. Depending on what is your style and subjects you will tend to either over- or underexpose. If you overexpose you get better overall picture quality but if you have extreme highlights in the picture you need to underexpose the rest to still get the information in the highlights. Because your eyes do see them as our vision is put together in our brain. The same was done with film by the way, when developing film and bringing it onto paper the same manipulations were done, actually many features in Photoshop are named after processes that were used in film development because they did digitally what labs did analogue.
Load More Replies...The editing work on these pictures is great. I feel many look at editing as a form of cheating, it is understandable, but I believe these edits are there to show the intention and vision of the photographer rather than reproduce reality. It is a creative process.
Editing is absolutely necessary. Your camera does some of it (it's a computer, after all, with a B&W sensor that gets turned into color by camera software), you can (and often should) do more with Photoshop. Some photographers have to try and capture reality - that is the essence of photojournalism. For everyone else, the photographer's vision or the vision of the person who is paying them, is the only thing that matters.
Load More Replies...Does anyone else see this as cheating when claiming this is photography?
Cheating? If someone adds or removes something from a photo being presented as a photojournalism (i.e. news), that's cheating. If you're making art, there is no such thing as cheating. You are under no obligation to present your work according to someone else's artificial standards. Art photography is no different than any other kind of art. Make what you see in your head even if no one else likes it.
Load More Replies...I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, it's because I feel (slightly) misled. I came here looking for interesting photos that were maybe tweaked a little, not for photos that are really quite different from their originals. For many, there's a line between an actual photograph and a piece of art that has been fabricated. For me, a lot of these photos fall down on the side of the latter. I'm not knocking it, but it's not why I'm here.
Load More Replies...Some of these pictures were so over edited they looked worse than the original. I feel it's no shame to edit a bit so you can truly see what's in the picture. But in many cases the magic and beauty captured in the original was edited out so they all looked the same and sometimes like cheap catalogue pictures from a traveling site and no longer like real pictures from the actual site
I'm tired of all the people saying "I prefer the first one!" Like, okay, we get it. You're too good for photoshop. Don't have to brag.
Nearly all of these are just auto levels and auto color (same thing as auto levels but with each color channel independently) in Photoshop. Those are generally not regarded by photographers as "editing" photos. Your eye has a lot more dynamic range and a color sensitivity which cannot be replicated by film/sensors. So some tweaking of levels is necessary to get the photo to look more like the actual scene does to the naked eye. It's possible to go overboard with this (typically oversaturating). But the vast majority of display devices target the sRGB color space, so are not able to generate colors as saturated as you can see in real life. The colors in the photo only look oversaturated because you're comparing the photo to itself. And if you think "traditional" photos shot on film were not edited this way, I have a bridge to sell you. Nearly all of Ansel Adams' photos required a whole lot of dodging and burning.
I have been saying and commenting this for years. I know you want a good picture but this is too much. And always when I said this on BP, people say 'no it really could be that blue/yellow etc. And now everyone is like' I liked the original better'..
None of these photographs make me feel anything, one way or the other. The afters are technically nice, but they're not inspiring. The befores are just dull.
Just goes to show you can not trust anything you see in pictures today
A little bit is ok, but this is so far over the top that pictures done in this way should come with a disclaimer stating the level of manipulation.
There's tweaking photographs, then there's turning it into digital art. And this is fine, but sometimes, these "photo's" look way too saturated. Like many photo's of Cherry Blossom in Japan etc, they're way over saturated to look bright pink, and having been there in person, they are genuinely not like that at all, many are even closer to white than they are pink.. . And the real colours are just as beautiful, if not moreso, than being over saturated to the point that it hurts to even look at!
I'm not a photographer, so I don't mind a bit of tweaking when the light (or my phone camera) doesn't cooperate & detail is not visible. However, the many pics here where they added FX & merged images, while beautiful, should be considered artwork, not photography, even if started w/a pic.
To be honest, although the finished photos are beautiful to look at, once we've reached this point, I feel it's no longer "photography" as you're no longer capturing a moment or angle or degree of light. You're using a photograph simply as the basis for a digital artwork, and believe me: I like digital art. I think the photoshopped artwork here is beautiful. But it's not photography. Those images aren't real anymore, and it's no longer just tweaking the light a bit or bringing out the color, but reimagining the whole scene.
Exactly, a bit of tweaking (brightness, contrast etc) it's very useful for photography, but this is indeed digital art.
Load More Replies...This guy is just a very poor photographer. The originals are mostly under-exposed, presumably by just letting the camera do everything for them. Sure, the end results may be stunning, but a real professional photographer should be able to capture the image as it is without resorting to post-processing.
Actually no, a good photographer knows the limits of the sensor and exposes in a way that the best result can be achieved in editing. Depending on what is your style and subjects you will tend to either over- or underexpose. If you overexpose you get better overall picture quality but if you have extreme highlights in the picture you need to underexpose the rest to still get the information in the highlights. Because your eyes do see them as our vision is put together in our brain. The same was done with film by the way, when developing film and bringing it onto paper the same manipulations were done, actually many features in Photoshop are named after processes that were used in film development because they did digitally what labs did analogue.
Load More Replies...The editing work on these pictures is great. I feel many look at editing as a form of cheating, it is understandable, but I believe these edits are there to show the intention and vision of the photographer rather than reproduce reality. It is a creative process.
Editing is absolutely necessary. Your camera does some of it (it's a computer, after all, with a B&W sensor that gets turned into color by camera software), you can (and often should) do more with Photoshop. Some photographers have to try and capture reality - that is the essence of photojournalism. For everyone else, the photographer's vision or the vision of the person who is paying them, is the only thing that matters.
Load More Replies...Does anyone else see this as cheating when claiming this is photography?
Cheating? If someone adds or removes something from a photo being presented as a photojournalism (i.e. news), that's cheating. If you're making art, there is no such thing as cheating. You are under no obligation to present your work according to someone else's artificial standards. Art photography is no different than any other kind of art. Make what you see in your head even if no one else likes it.
Load More Replies...I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, it's because I feel (slightly) misled. I came here looking for interesting photos that were maybe tweaked a little, not for photos that are really quite different from their originals. For many, there's a line between an actual photograph and a piece of art that has been fabricated. For me, a lot of these photos fall down on the side of the latter. I'm not knocking it, but it's not why I'm here.
Load More Replies...Some of these pictures were so over edited they looked worse than the original. I feel it's no shame to edit a bit so you can truly see what's in the picture. But in many cases the magic and beauty captured in the original was edited out so they all looked the same and sometimes like cheap catalogue pictures from a traveling site and no longer like real pictures from the actual site
I'm tired of all the people saying "I prefer the first one!" Like, okay, we get it. You're too good for photoshop. Don't have to brag.
Nearly all of these are just auto levels and auto color (same thing as auto levels but with each color channel independently) in Photoshop. Those are generally not regarded by photographers as "editing" photos. Your eye has a lot more dynamic range and a color sensitivity which cannot be replicated by film/sensors. So some tweaking of levels is necessary to get the photo to look more like the actual scene does to the naked eye. It's possible to go overboard with this (typically oversaturating). But the vast majority of display devices target the sRGB color space, so are not able to generate colors as saturated as you can see in real life. The colors in the photo only look oversaturated because you're comparing the photo to itself. And if you think "traditional" photos shot on film were not edited this way, I have a bridge to sell you. Nearly all of Ansel Adams' photos required a whole lot of dodging and burning.
I have been saying and commenting this for years. I know you want a good picture but this is too much. And always when I said this on BP, people say 'no it really could be that blue/yellow etc. And now everyone is like' I liked the original better'..
None of these photographs make me feel anything, one way or the other. The afters are technically nice, but they're not inspiring. The befores are just dull.
Just goes to show you can not trust anything you see in pictures today
A little bit is ok, but this is so far over the top that pictures done in this way should come with a disclaimer stating the level of manipulation.
There's tweaking photographs, then there's turning it into digital art. And this is fine, but sometimes, these "photo's" look way too saturated. Like many photo's of Cherry Blossom in Japan etc, they're way over saturated to look bright pink, and having been there in person, they are genuinely not like that at all, many are even closer to white than they are pink.. . And the real colours are just as beautiful, if not moreso, than being over saturated to the point that it hurts to even look at!
I'm not a photographer, so I don't mind a bit of tweaking when the light (or my phone camera) doesn't cooperate & detail is not visible. However, the many pics here where they added FX & merged images, while beautiful, should be considered artwork, not photography, even if started w/a pic.