The lie and why: photo retouching

Shot with X100V

What is photography? Capturing a moment in time as is. Reality put to a halt. A registration. Pure and honest. Or is it? 

Films have a certain character. Colorwise, grainwise or maybe the complete lack of color in black and white films. Digital cameras and sensors have character and a way of rendering the photo. The photographer has his or her own way to capture a subject. They can add meaning to a photo by changing position and perspective, by choosing a certain lens or camera. All this is adding to the image.

Why do we take pictures? To document something. A wedding, news, war, politics, beauty, food, instagram. You name it. It can be anything. For any reason. The most important thing: we want to put something across and show the world.

Shot with Ricoh GR

The photos you see on this website were all retouched. Retouched for the sake of delivering a feeling. They were all shot with digital cameras (no exceptions) and developed in Capture One, converted to black and white with Silver efex pro and further tweaked in photoshop if necessary.

Here’s an example:

The first image is the raw file straight out of camera without editing. The image is leaning to the left because I didn’t keep the camera straight obviously. I corrected that in the second image and also changed the tonality and contrasts and introduced a lot more detail in the sky. All this keeping in mind the black and white conversion in which I want to be able to darken certain colours, like the blues in the sky. Preparing your RGB image for black and white conversion is very important. I never shoot in black and white. I’d like to have color files because there’s much more information in an RGB file to work with.

Finally the image on the right is the black and white edit. In black and white photography it is all about contrasts, graphic lines and shapes and of course tonality. As you can see I destroyed a lot of detail on the left part and made it almost completely black. I love the shape that leads your eye into the image and connects every element.

Is this still true photography or is it one big lie? A lot of photographers would argue that I changed the image and removed stuff so it is not true photography because I cheated after the exposure was done, and changed reality.

Shot with X100V

I love editing and retouching my photos. It is almost never the final product straight out of camera. Converting an RGB color file to black and white is already changing reality isn’t it?. I like to go a step further and adjust the image so it looks a lot stronger and more atmospheric without losing “the feel” of the photograph itself.

Shot with X-T2 and 16mm 2.8

So, are my images a lie? Yes. They are not showing the actual photo I took but a more surreal world in black and white. When I take a picture I already have an idea how it will look in black and white, or at least, how I can make it look. I have always been shooting in black and white, analog in the past and now digital. That’s how I imagine my photos and see the world.

Hope you can appreciate it. You’ve made it this far so I guess you do. 😁

More on photo retouching: Darkroom or Lightroom?

“Selfie” shot with the Ricoh GR

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