Do I Process My Pictures? Of course I do. And so do you.

I sometimes encounter people who ask if I process my pictures before printing them or displaying then on my website. When I say that I do post-process them, they mutter something about cheating and they claim that they take only "natural" pictures.

What they don't understand is that they too are processing their photographs. The act of using an electromechanical device to refract light onto a sensor, whether chemical or electronic, is certainly not "natural". The image is always processed, either by firmware in the camera, or software in the computer, or the technician and equipment in the lab. Decisions are made about exposure, saturation, contrast, brightness, and a miriad of other variables. Most printing services, whether film or digital, make automatic adjustments to your photos before printing them. If you don't do it, then someone, or some program, does it for you. Do you trust them to do it better than you? Were they there when you pressed the shutter? Did they see that original scene?

It is understandable that these "purists" might want a photograph which represents, as closely as possible, what the eye would see. But a camera, a monitor, or a print can not, by their very nature, replicate the scene which falls on the retina. Modifying perspective by using wide or long lenses is unnatural. Digital noise or film grain isn't natural. Limited dynamic range in a static photograph, compared with the ability of the eye to adjust while looking at different parts of a scene, isn't natural. Focusing on a single point in the scene is unlike the eye's natural ability to refocus as it moves. Color shifts aren't natural.

Is it fair to adjust the contrast by selecting a specific film, but unfair to adjust the contrast for the same effect with a computer? What about adjusting the settings on your enlarger to remove a color cast caused by the film? Is it evil if it's done digitally? What difference does it make if you remove a beer can from a landscape scene before you click the shutter or during post-processing? Is one cheating while the other is not? If you claim that an image is as accurate and natural as possible, then moving a tree would certainly be considered cheating. But adjusting the contrast and color, or smoothing the digitally imposed noise artifacts from a sky, to make the image more accurately represent what you saw, or even felt, are certainly not lying.

The masters like Ansel Adams understood this. He may have taken days to prepare for, and shoot, a specific scene, but then he would work on the print for weeks, and then revisit and rework it years later to get it just right. His notes on adjusting contrast, dodging and burning, printing and final touchup are amazingly similar to post-processing a landscape image in Photoshop. Read his book "The Print" to see how this master Naturalist made nature look like nature.

Dale Keller