With photography it’s also a grey area. I’m a professional underwater photographer. I’ve got thousands of dollars of specialized housings, lighting, wet lenses, etc, but the color is still wrong because water. Meanwhile some open water student swam by 40 minutes ago and made the whole area hazy.
So for decades I’ve done various degrees of touch up and and color grading because what you see with your eyes looks nothing like what comes out of the camera because human eyes and brains do a lot of processing that camera sensors don’t.
And then there’s generative stuff that I don’t think impact the art of photography. If someone uses generative noise reduction I don’t think that’s a problem. The non-generative solution to that is spending an extra 10 grand on a better camera and lens, so it’s not as much of a skill issue as a money one. I’m absolutely fine with people using generative tools for that stuff.
So where’s the border between acceptable and unacceptable post-processing? There’s clearly bad stuff like wholesale fakes and such, but I don’t know if we have a clear line.
Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.
With photography it’s also a grey area. I’m a professional underwater photographer. I’ve got thousands of dollars of specialized housings, lighting, wet lenses, etc, but the color is still wrong because water. Meanwhile some open water student swam by 40 minutes ago and made the whole area hazy.
So for decades I’ve done various degrees of touch up and and color grading because what you see with your eyes looks nothing like what comes out of the camera because human eyes and brains do a lot of processing that camera sensors don’t.
And then there’s generative stuff that I don’t think impact the art of photography. If someone uses generative noise reduction I don’t think that’s a problem. The non-generative solution to that is spending an extra 10 grand on a better camera and lens, so it’s not as much of a skill issue as a money one. I’m absolutely fine with people using generative tools for that stuff.
So where’s the border between acceptable and unacceptable post-processing? There’s clearly bad stuff like wholesale fakes and such, but I don’t know if we have a clear line.
Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.