Photographic Editing Offences - #3. SELECTIVE COLOURING

The lack of creativity is disturbing.

Don't be fooled by selective colouring in digital photos. There is nothing clever about it and will only convey the so called 'artist' as another pathetic and uncreative moron. Look out for black and white scenes featuring a woman in a red dress, or a field of monochrome sunflowers with just one of them standing proud and in colour. It's PATHETIC.

Just because you got a B grade in your middle school art exam doesn't make you a prodigy in the field of photography. Quite frankly, your time would be better spent torturing small animals with the use of a microwave rather than editing photos resulting in sickly creations like this.

It's nothing more than another tacky editing process that is an attempt to make a poor photograph seem more interesting. Sure it worked, for a while, about ten years ago when a photographer first discovered the masking tool in whatever version of Photoshop was around in those days, but now, they are thrashed about and as tacky as Princess Diana souvenirs.

Lets get one thing straight. You are not Steven Spielberg nor Frank Miller and you cannot pull this one off. Leave it to the experts please and stop stripping your photos of all life in a vain attempts at disguising your lack of skilled photography!


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Long live PEO!

Photographic Editing Offences - #2. WATERMARKING

So, you're pathetic enough to believe someone will steal your photos?

In this post I will be talking about one of the fundamental offences of photographic editing, namely watermarking photographs.

Perhaps every photographer reading this has at one time watermarked one of their photos to protect it from the thieves on the Internet. This not only ruins your priceless work of art, it makes you look like a big headed, self absorbed twerp. What gave you the impression that your photo was amazing enough to be protected?

If somebody on 'da interwebz' wants your picture, they will take it. If you're that scared a crappy, overexposed, landscape you took while on holiday is going to be stolen by the hackers, then don't upload it to the Internet.

Say a company that wants to use your photo, (which I very much doubt) they will not steal it. They will contact you and ask for its use. If they don't, then you can still invoice them. A watermark will not make a difference. Actually it will - they'll pass it by thinking it's going to be too expensive because you watermarked it.

Let's face it... you'd let it run in a magazine for free anyway.

Wouldn't you?

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Photographic Editing Offences - The List

CLICK THIS to see where it all started.

THE LIST

1. Framing
The process of putting a few extra pixels and lines around your digital image to add 'impact.'

2. Watermarks
The needless rape of a photograph because the photographer is big headed enough to believe someone will come and steal his/her photo to profit from it.

3. Selective Colouring
The process of converting an image to monochrome, but leaving one element coloured, such as a tram, or lady in a red dress.

4. The Flood Filter
A Photoshop plugin introduced a few years ago that everyone went crazy for. Everything for about a year was submerged in perfectly generated rippled water.

5. Highly Overprocessed HDR
The latest new FAD... HDR techniques have been around for over 100 years (Yes they have.) But overprocessed tone mapping nonsense from the likes of Photomatix users are all the rage right now.

6. Fake Polaroid Frame
Can't find any Polaroid film? Doesn't matter... Fake it and pretend you're an instant film master.

7. Out of Focus Macros. (BOKEH)
"Out of focus macros. (You call it bokeh, I call it bollo**s. You're supposed to INCREASE the depth of field with close-ups, not leave half the critter/leaf out of focus)."

8. Tilt and Shift Fakes.
Very simple post processing involving blurring a major part of a photograph (usually one overlooking a street.) The selective blurring appears as a shallow depth of field, to give it the photo the appearance of looking like a minature model village.

9. Fake film frames around Digital photographs (similar to #6)

10. Black and White Street Photography
"It's 2009 ffs."

11. Being a smug wa**er / Purists and Ludites and intentional attacks on photographers artistic explorations.
Guilty!

12. TTV (Through the viewfinder.)
As Macredeye says.. "why?" It is basically a photo of what you see when looking through a camera viewfinder. If you want to do it you'll need a small lens. I find my cameraphone does the trick.

13. Cloning yourself / Multiplicity
Keep your camera on a tripod and take 10 pictures of yourself looking like a twit in different positions. Use each file to clone yourself in layer after layer. That'll make you look cool won't it?

14. The Orton Effect.
The original technique invented by Michael Orton was to overlay two or more images of an identical scene with very different exposures on slide film. One image is sharply focused and the others are very out of focus. Alex.Dram points out that he cannot find a reasonable need for it's existence. (Yes I tried it once too.)


15. Supreme Lack of Subject Matter
thank you Wiseacre for this edition. He states that: my personal peeve with any of these techniques isn't the techniques (or gimmicks), but the supreme lack of subject matter. Bokeh is fine, but of lights, raindrops, a leaf -- anyone with a 50mm and able to set their camera correctly can do that.

16. Attempting to digitally recreate an originally unpredictable effect in a very deliberate way.
You've got a brand new digital camera, it takes 40Mp pictures. You have a £1200 lens... Yet you process your photos to make them look like you took them with a £5 Holga.

17. Light trails.
ahh, how cute. You've learnt long exposures and you've had this great and original thought of going to the local motorway overpass with your tripod and taking a photo of all the red and white lights whizzing passed. Guess what? It's not original.

18. Lens Flare
Now I can't believe I left this off the list. It's perhaps the oldest gimmick on photoshop/psp/corel. Tacky lens flare added to photos creating a little sparkle with faded lines all over the picture. Such beauty!

19. Standard full photo filters
Hmm... My photo looks crap. How about if I press this buttom. *BOOM* It's embossed! Or suddenly looks like an impressionist painting, or has the effect of fur or leather or....

20. Planetoids
Ooh look at this lovely landscape. Best turn it into a planet. Oh not just here though. I'm going to do one EVERYWHERE I GO. Planet, planet planet all day long. Click here to see, but beware, you may end up carving out your own eyes with a spoon.

21. View On Black
"Oh god, yeah. That's probably worse than putting a black frame round a photo. If I want to view something on black, I'll print it out and shove it up my bottom." Thank you.

22. Photographers who think they are poets
All thanks to Jamalrob for suggesting this travesty. Such titles on photographs as "True beauty lies within" or "I stopped, I stared, I wondered, as I walked through my placid life" .... on a LANDSCAPE photograph. Grow up you pretentious....

23. Listening to Jazz While Editing Your Photos
A serious offence. May lead to any of the above being reproduced.

24. Cutting the corners off
Why? Have I missed some health and safety b*ll*cks? Do I need to put on a Hi-Viz vest before I go into photoshop. Will I take "someones eye out wi that"?

25. Out of Frame
OMFG WTF LOOK! I'm stepping OUT-OF-THE-FRAME. Man, I am SO awesome.

26. Panoramic stitch togethers
ANYTHING... and I mean anything, that ends up as a gimmick that can be used with a mobile phone is a dreadful offence.

27. Immaculate skin
"...portraits with the skin blurred softened into oblivion. Like seeing pores will kill you. instantly." Thank you.

28. Oversharpening
Anyone who goes to a camera club will understand the fact that since digital photography started popping up... so did oversharpening. It's the sick practise of taking an out of focus photo and jacking up every sharpening filter to FIX it. This offence comes with a 3 year ban on digital cameras.

29. Dropshadow/Buttonise
...Or ANYTHING that makes your photo look like it's jumping off the screen. Creating the illusion that your photo is a 3D work of art is a processing crime. If it's a good photo, it won't need it!

30. Texture Layers
Why must you insist on taking another photo of crumbly plaster and using it to take a dump on another photo? Layers of any type of texture are big and not clever. A bit like stupid dwarfs.

31. Infrared Conversion
Crappy landscape? Convert to B+W... still looks crap? Convert to infrared... oooh... look... it glows.... pretty

32. Cropping
Just because you've got a camera that shoots @ 30Megapixel does not mean you can get lazy about filling up the full frame. Get it right first time and remember "crop is crap."

33. ATTEMPTING TO BE CLEVER
This is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable. There is to be no freedom of thought allowed in any photo editing. Here at Flickrschwitz we like minimal curve adjustment and colour correction ONLY. Anything else and vee shall av u tekkin owt zide and zhot!

34. Fractalius
More like syphilis. Take any boring old picture and turn it into some kind of light drawing that will make you want to scratch out your own eyes with a rusty fork. Needless vandalism on your photos.

35. Drink/Drugs While Editing
As demonstrated by many of the thread posters including www.flickr.com/photos/alexdram/, JAMALROB, BLUEBOY & GONEFORAWANDER this may lead to any of the above offences being commited or even worse, topic posts that you may regret in the morning.

36. Straight from my mobile phone and I'm proud of it.
Grow up. Nobody cares.

37. BHL Gimmicks
The never ending camel ride that is BIG HUGE LABS. This is not easy to approach. Everything and anything is available here. It's where View on Black (#21) comes from... Turn your photo into a billboard or a jigsaw. Create instant works of art. This site is photography's version of the Garden of Eden. Please... PLEASE... DO NOT EAT THE F***ING APPLE.

38. Warholizer
So you think you're Andy Warhol do you? Think that you'd look cool/retro/kitsch/chic if you were multiplied and changed into psychodelic colours? You don't. You look like a prat. Just one of you in the correct colour is enough.

39. Portrait Dumping Grounds
Take your boring portraits and jazz them up using a vile uploading process online. Yersinia alerted us to these ever growing ghastly websites of photo destruction. Such sites as DUMPR or PHOTOFUNIA are trainwrecks and need to be cleaned up.

40. Vignetting
Why? You bought a digital camera to get rid of this common film problem. Don't fake it and pretend you're an artist. You little cheat, you.

41. NOT Cropping
Throwing away or leaving as suboptimal a potentially good shot just because you've confused Cartier-Bresson with God.

42. Abnormally Large Moon
Layering a telephoto, way-out-of-proportion moon into a wide angle night landscape. This isn't science fiction. This isn't a Disney film. This is photography, stop messing about, before I confiscate ur 300mm that rattles.

43. Retitle your photo to "Untitled"
This one struck a nerve in our new GROUP. Not bothering to retitle your picture from the camera file name ie. DSC_0272.jpg is one thing, but actually being so self absorbed that you retiltle your crappy little picture of an abandoned bike in the snow "UNTITLED" is pure blasphemy. A sure sign that the world is coming to an end.

44. Amazing Circles
I've just been holding my head in my hands thinking about what to write about these. I started crying actually. This role of documenting these offences is getting a little too much. Just... Erm... Just... Take a look for yourself....

45. Making a David Hockney
Taking many photographs of one person and arranging them in a neo-Cubist manner like David Hockney. You twit. Take a look at these dumb attempts named Picasso Portraits.

46. Triptych
This gross act of indecency is indulged only by the slightly more pretentious artist/photographers out there... Who want to tell a story with their photos. This is usually the result of all 3 photos being crap.

47. Mosaic
I seem to remember, sometime around eight years ago there was a star wars poster, made up of thousands of time movie stills from star wars in a kind of mosaic. THAT WAS EIGHT YEARS AGO. IT'S TACKY AND OVER DONE. MOVE ON LOSER.