One of my photography teachers at my college stated one day that the best photographers are those who do not feel the need to edit their pictures. Unless it's for some strange effect, impossible to create naturally, editing a photograph is like cheating. This statement has troubled me for a good while because I often find myself wanting to fix my photos a bit. I do not know what to make of this. Is picture editing essentially cheating away talent?

that question (and the argument it causes) is as old as photography itself. even though your photography teacher probably is a respectful person with and abundance of experience and wisdom, i wouldn't give a horse dropping on his statement. ;-)

every camera has technical limits and specifications. it's just a tool to capture the raw material of something you want to make visible. if you so want, it "cheats" itself by restricting the outcome to a chemical or electric reaction, which then cheats by means of paper or a monitor what your eyes will percept and cheatingly transmit to the neurons of your brain... you get my drift, right?

now, your brain is important. it should be the one sitting on top of the camera tool and using it to your advantage. which means, you gotta know the tools functions and limits and how to "trick" out of it what you like to show. basically, using post processing software like photoshop is nothing else but the development process of the raw material the camera caught, so correcting whatever you like with this software is part of the photographic process itself - just like developing a picture in the darkroom.

fixing your pictures to whatever you want to achieve with them is a learning process. it requires you to reflect what you actually want to achieve and learn the techniques to achieve it - including to accept that some things can't be fixed. i've never been able to make a great picture out of a miserable shot. but you can enhance and help a good picture to become a great one by fixing it up into the direction your brain intends - it's as easy and as challenging as that.

It depends what you mean by cheating and what type of photography you are talking about. Post processing is a complete no-no as far as photo-journalism is concerned. You can't use it for photography that will be submitted in a court of law, photography that is designed to create an accurate historical record or in many scientifically driven photographic projects.

However, if your photography is more about producing pleasing or thought provoking images then I'm not sure that it matters much, if at all. If you are looking for a high aesthetic, then surely you'd want to (have the ability to) use every tool at your disposal to get the best looking image. The disciplines of advertising photography, food photography and many others are almost inconceivable without at least a little touching up. In these areas, I think Stormfish's "Horseshit" is the most appropriate phrase.

That said, I can see why your teacher might want you to think that it's cheating. If they are there to teach you camera skills, as opposed to photoshop skills, they'll want the work you submit to be unadulterated; they'll want to ensure that you can achieve the desired effect using the skills they've taught, not through clever electronic "trickery". It seems to me that it's best to aim for the closest possible thing to the desired end result using the camera, but not to shy away from any necessary tidying/altering afterwards (unless your teacher has specifically asked you not to).

My guess is that your teacher is bored out of his mind by looking at so much student work that has been edited in HDR. I have the same reaction. So many people use this technique before they have mastered the art of creating a perfect image in their camera. It has a certain WOW factor, but that soon fades to "Oh not again"

Taking a technically perfect photograph is so difficult, even with today's doitallforyou cameras, but when you achieve it, you know that you are finally starting to understanding the medium. Then you can start to do a bit of editing where and when it is appropriate.

Oh God!!! Please don`t say that as I`m battling with new post processing software and trying to understand a new vocabulary almost. I try not to do too much post processing but think this is definetly due to my own reluctance to spend time learning what to do!!!!! My camera is not particularly expensive and the lenses not of the quality I`d like so post processing helps me limit these affects, I think...))

I wrote this in the HDR thread too, and i stand by my statement:
"Definition of photography = The art or practice of taking and processing photographs"
Sure, you can take photos that look insanely good without the need of editing at all, if you are really good at it...
But I dont think the post-processing is cheating... Like Jarvo said, if your goal is to provoke a thought, an emotion, a feeling - then theres nothing wrong with editing....
If you shoot in RAW, it almost needs some little tweaks to make the colours more vibrant or to get the white balance the way you want it... Thats the beauty of it, you can get a thousand looks from one photo!!!
Its just about finding the look, feeling, emotion and thought, that you as the artist think suits the best....
Altho, i do understand the teacher in a way: looking at hundreds of photos that have been edited too much, can be boring...

I think your teacher was trying to warn you not to focus on post-processing at the cost of composition and lighting when you take the shot. This is something film photographers had to learn the hard way because it is much harder to change a film image.

This might come as a surprise to some, but I'm going to take a less radical position than Sadhya or Michael, although I agree with them to an extent. The statement that "the camera never lies" has never been true. Take a look at the contact sheets and roughs of the early masters - Man Ray for example - to see just how much they cropped, dodged, burned and otherwise altered their work. However, they knew what they were doing. Today's scripts and one-click plugins are a quick fix to achieve a "wow" effect without the bother of learning why.

All cameras - including digital ones - are essentially analog. Physical rays of light are bent and distorted before being recorded and then converted into data. Anyone who's used lens correction profiles in Photoshop, DxO or Lightroom can see just how much images are distorted. Light metering is a guestimate at best. The sensor and the A/D converter have a narrower optical range (darkest to lightest tones) than the human eye. Wide-angle lenses, macros and telephoto lenses are all a "cheat" in the sense that they capture what the unaided human eye can't see.

All these factors - and many more - justify a degree of "cheating", i.e., correcting for camera/lens imperfections, not to mention cropping, which the eye-brain combination does all the time. Image editing software began as an alternative to film processing (you still find film techniques such as dodge/burn, colour filters and unsharp mask in Photoshop). It’s gone way beyond this to open whole new vistas of creativity, but we shouldn’t forget the basics. Picasso had to learn to draw and paint classically before he could go on to cubist portraits of women with vertical eyes. At our far more modest level, so must we.

Tell your teacher – politely! – from me that I think s/he’s wrong. One of the earliest intellectual property law cases from the 1840s was between an artist and a photographer who sold Daguerreotypes of the artist’s work. The artist claimed the photographer was ripping off his work. In effect, photography was merely photocopying. The court rightly threw the case out on the grounds that photography is an art form in its own right, in which the photographer’s idiosyncrasies and preferences dictate the creative statement, just like the artist’s, but in a different medium. The real argument to offer your teacher is whether creativity is cheating…

A counter example and a famous story: Giotto was asked by the pope to demonstrate his skill. He drew a perfect freehand circle. Does that mean all of us who use a compass are cheating?

Hope this helps.

P.S. I shoot only in RAW. I edit every single image captured by my camera.

Great discussion, but this has been going on from the start of photography and always will, me I just love it all, at the moment I am using HDR, just to get use to it and it has it's place like all others, but in moderation I will agree, keep up the good work.

The trouble with that Giotto is he wasn't all he was cracked up to be. I heard a story the other day that Tony Hart (British PBers of a certain age may remember him as the artist in residence on Vision On and the designer of the Blue Peter badge), could draw a circle on the ground that looked perfect from the perspective of the camera, but that from his perspective was an “elongated egg shape”.

@ Jon: which rather proves my point, doesn't it? And I am old enough to remember him in Take Hart... The Giotto circle story comes from Vasari, who was writing in the second half of the 16th century about events at the turn of the 14th. I use a computer in the 21st because all my circles look manky with or without a camera.

I think I understand everyone's side. I definitely no longer feel ashamed about fixing my photographs.