after photoshop is it still your art?

now that we are in the digital age and most of us are using digital cameras after you pull your photo in Photoshop or some other software it is still your art? Does Photoshop help you fix your errors or if you left it alone with all its faws make the picture have character? Can we walk up to one of the old great photographers that had to use film, that picture have been seen all over the world and say it could have been better if you touched it up in Photoshop.

what do you think, does Photoshop kills the character of a picture or make it better?

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Permalink Reply by nathan mccreery on April 11, 2010 at 7:04pm

Many of the fine art photographers, whose work is either in the landscape or is studio type work, that I know who "cut their teeth" using film still use film and have the film, either negative or chromes, scanned and then work from the scans. Usually these scans are in the realm of 400mb so they are very large files. Almost all of the black and white guys I am familiar with still use film and hand print their work up to 30x40". If you go into almost any top tier gallery almost all (upwards of 80%) of the black and white work will be hand printed. In fact I was in several galleries in Santa Fe earlier this year and ALL of the black and white work was hand printed. More than half the color work will be either hand printed or from scanned files. I'm sure that will change, and is changing.

It still comes back to the basic premise though that if the work is created by you, and the print was made by you then it is your work Photoshop or not. Before digital it was common for photographers to send work out for printing, since many didn't want to learn the needed skills to make their own prints. To me that's like Van Gogh or Picasso coming up with an idea and then having someone else "flesh it out", and then calling it theirs, which did happen but is dishonest; IMO. Photography communicates ideas. They should be the ideas of the photographer. With or without Photoshop.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Dobbs on April 24, 2010 at 11:31pm

Yes it is still yours; nobody has taken it. Try not to be defensive about being creative.
To answer your second question, if an image is going to have its character killed or improved its the result of whoever did the work to it. Photoshop is only a tool.
Now, let's get out there and be creative.