Reading the product page for the newly announced Photoshop Elements for Mac really drove home the growing divide between photography and digital imaging (which I have commented on before). Just look at the features they are touting:
The ability to make franken-photos by cutting and pasting people an things from a series of photos. I am sure this will come in handy for stalkers everywhere to put themselves in photos with their secret love that never actually happened. Yikes.
And of course, a PS favorite, the ability to change areas of a photo to create colors that didn’t originally exist. Why strive for fidelity in your images when you can turn a sunflower orange and that grey sky blue?
Enhanced ability to create black and whites. This is so overused already because people seem to think that converting an image to B&W instantly gives it some kind of classy/artsy cred that it never had (and never will). It is just annoying.
And my personal favorite: ‘one click adjustments‘. The perfect opportunity to make your pictures look like everyone else’s — not what you actually shot, but what some algorithm thinks is good. No creativity required at all.
Of course, there is nothing to say that you must use PS on your photos. It is just bewildering to me how many people do use it (and abuse it). As one famous professional photographer stated in a podcast (paraphrasing): ‘It is amazing how things have changed. For me the creative process is everything I do before I click the shutter: composition, exposure control, lighting, etc. But today, for most ‘photographers’ the ‘creative’ process starts after they click the shutter…’
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