I was scrolling through Twitter while I was in California when I stumbled on a piece of news that shocked me. Adobe unveiled a new feature coming to Photoshop: deblurring photos.
The software analyzes the photo to figure out how it’s supposed to look. It then fixes it. If you look at the video in the link above, you can hear the crowd react with shock and awe as they see photo become sharp and in focus.
If you look how photos were taken and processed 10 years ago and compare it to today, it’s like light and day. I was still shooting film and it was still cost prohibitive to own a digital SLR 10 years ago. When I was in college a little more than a decade ago, we shot film and scanned the negatives before using Photoshop.
Now anyone who wants a digital SLR camera can afford one. Many camera companies aren’t even selling film cameras any more. Those cameras have all sorts of auto settings to help you make a beautiful photo. And if you don’t shoot it well, you can fix it in Photoshop.
And with the new advent of removing blur in Photoshop, is there really any way to ruin a photo any more? Have we gotten to the point where every photo will end up perfect?
When I was learning to shoot photos in college, I remember my professor explaining how shooting slide film is the ultimate. You cannot make a mistake shooting on slide film. It is unforgiving. My father later confirmed the same assessment. He preferred to shoot slide film because of its difficult nature (aside: the first SLR I ever used was his camera). I shot on slide film a few times just to prove to myself I could do it. My cherry blossom photos came out well. My Capitol at night photos had more mixed results. You could screw it up, and it was satisfying to do it well.
It’s sort of why I enjoyed the dark room so much. You could screw things up easily there too. Need to dodge more. Need to burn less. Try a third or fourth or even fifth time. But when you got it right after a good 30 minutes, you felt accomplished. And that was for one photo.
Today I cannot think of a similar format that is as unforgiving as slide film. Everything can be shot perfectly, but even if it’s not it can be fixed. It’s just a matter of knowing what does what in Photoshop. I also now can process in Photoshop a whole group of photos in the time it would take me to do one or two in the dark room.
I recently spoke with my father about the advent of the deblurring tool coming to Photoshop and how I thought you can no longer ruin a photo. “Everything can look perfect now.” But he pointed out that even if you can take a perfect photo, you still need an eye. You need to know about things like the best times of day to get the right natural light. You need to know about the rule of thirds. And you need a unique perspective.
But how much can technology replace the artistic perspective of photography? Are we getting to that point?
I do think this is a bit of a double-edged sword. Have I ever taken a photo that should have been, could have been stunning if only it had been a bit more …. ahem … focused? Yes, and it still ticks me off every time that happens. Sadly, being a rookie that happens more often than I’d like to admit, usually because I’m rushing (nature shots) and/or I can’t think through the process quickly enough to capture a perfect shot. So part of me applauds this technical advance, but part of me wants to shun it. Some day maybe I’ll be a good enough photographer that this tool won’t even be a temptation, but I’d still like to have it for those few shots that don’t quite measure up to my expectations. Will having this tool make anyone a better photographer? I doubt it. We (should) all know by now that perfect photos are more than crisply focused pictures! ;)
We’re definitely getting close. To a certain extent, you can even add artificial lighting in after the fact–though I don’t remember how. Now how about you share some of those cherry blossom photos?
rontuaru: I think we all struggle with certain types of photos. I can’t say I’ve never taken a blurry photo. It’s usually a sports shot. And I still need to refine my low-light photography skills better. But the advances in technology make me wonder how much more we rely on it than honing our skills to take the shots we want.
And absolutely agree how some of the best photos aren’t perfectly crisp. I should have used the photo from the North Shore where a portion of the photo is out of focus on purpose.
Andrew: I’d have to find them! They are probably in a box at my parents’ house.
So nice to hear you talk about film, Jen. I got my start professionally using an Argus C-3 rangefinder 35 mm and a “Jimmy Olson-era” camera with plates. Perhaps my most forgiving camera was a Canon EX-Auto rangefind that was too good for amateurs and not good enough for a pro–but, boy, every goof I made never appeared in the prints (excepting my offhandeded compostion.)
Keep up your commentary. I love memoirs of the biz, even if thy’re only 10 years old!
To paraphrase: “I love the smell of Dektol in the morning!”
I just took inventory and I still have three rolls of T-Max 400 and one roll of T-Max 400 in my fridge (I also have a couple rolls of that black and white film that gets developed in color chemicals, and a roll of Royal Gold 25 color film). Alas those have been in my fridge for years because I can’t seem to bring myself to finish off the last of my film. I still have an EOS A2E and a Rebel in my closet, though I think the Rebel has issues if I recall.
I miss shooting on film for all the reasons you mentioned, particularly the sense of accomplishment when you got something just right. There is a skill involved in the process of visualizing the shot and then making it happen. Because it is “cheap” to shoot lots of images with digital it actually doesn’t require nearly the eye it did when you shot on film, because so much of it can be fixed in post. If you have to pay for each shot you’re spending a little extra time developing the skills needed to get it right the first time and every time, even if you shoot 4-5 of them. Now you can shoot twenty, pick the best two and edit them into a good shot. That’s not to say you don’t still end up with a great picture, just that it makes for fewer photographers as “writers” and more photographers as “editors”.
Granted, it may just be early in the morning and I may be feeling a bit curmudgeonly, because maybe the same number of skilled photographers are still doing the great work and the ease of digital editing has just made “not crap” a much more attainable goal for the masses. Who am I to keep the masses from having the ability to create decent images? And who knows if the ease of editing is making more people aware of the desired composition or if it is just making fewer people able to see how great the greats are… I guess it depends on how cynical I’m feeling as to which camp I’m in.
Thanks for your comments Charles. I really love your thoughts on how technology is making photographers more into editors than writers. It’s a good comparison. And we really need to be both, not more one over the other.
It is easy to shoot five times of the same shot and then edit it for the best one, especially when you have a card that holds 700 RAW photos. I’ve worked to control doing that.
Jen, I absolutely have to agree with you on this. Whether film or digital, there are those shots that are just GREAT that were either created specifically by the eye of the photographer–or by accident, and you just got a great shot (as is the case with me since I really am not good with photo composition; I’m not an artist and don’t pretend to be). I think the idea that we can “fix” on digital is fine–I do it often, but mostly to fix a good pic I got of a friend that was too dark or something. But that certainly doesn’t mean that every photo in the world will now be perfect. There are some things you can’t save no matter what you do. A badly-composed or shot photo is STILL a badly-composed or shot photo. Nothing anyone can do in PhotoShop or even by using voodoo and killing chickens is going to change that.
[...] it saddens me to see how we’ve moved away from film so much in our society to the point where you can’t ruin a photo any more. It’s a loss for the craft of photography, and I wish film would make a serious comeback. It [...]