Photoshop: A Step Too Far?

We all know and love photoshop for what it is capable of. To the general public, photoshop makes plump celebrities skinnier.

But us tog's know its true potential. But where does one draw the line at photoshopping? When does it become unacceptable?

Landscapes have always been something that most togs have dabbled in at some point, and those togs who exclusively do landscapes generally do not mess about too much with CS2 or whatever Adobe image editing software they happen to be using at that time.

Most landscapers want a natural looking image, one free from too much editing. Im sure that the clone tool is possibly a favourite, and rightly so.

But what about actually rearranging different elements of an image?

Lets look at the image below,



It was taken with a kit lens, notoriously terrible, but budgets prevent splashing out on new optics tight now. The image above looks ok to a point, but overall its a bit untidy. The sky is plain, and the tower is leaning, and the trees to the right look awkward, would look much better with a little editing.

So, i cut out the tower and straightened it up, and then neatly blended it to the main church building.

Next i moved onto the sky and those untidy tree's. All i could do was replace the sky and tree's with a more prettier one. So i went out and found a suitable tree with appropriate sky, then added it to my original image after i had made a few adjustments with the levels and saturation tools.

But look at the direction of light in the sky/tree image below, the wrong direction, so all i did was spin the tree round and blended using clone tool and layers to create a neater join. In my humble opinion the fixed sky looks far better than both the sky below and above.



I then proceeded to saturate the brighter colours for added impact, being careful not to over do it.

Final job was to tidy up the edges of the church and tower where they met the sky. And here is the final image.



Most purist landscape photographers would frown down at thefinal edited version, saying that its not a true representation of the landscape which was in front of me. But i'd argue this point.

Although i do consider myself a photographer, i also consider myself an artist of sorts.

The final edited image does represent what i saw in front of me, but i have used my artistic abilities to interpret the scene in the way that it looks in my head, a perfectly composed image.

Some would argue that had i not composed the scene right before i took the image then i would need not make any adjustments.

But that group of trees in the original image let it down, and it was impossible to seperate the tree in the image from the tree thats only just seen in the original. And that sky was far too boring.