12.05.11
Guy Gowan: The five great lies of Photoshop
Photography Monthly master and Photoshop guru GUY GOWAN is a veteran teacher and developer of post production techniques. His seminars get packed out the world over and what he doesn’t know about Photoshop isn’t worth knowing. So we decided to set him a challenge and ask what he thinks are the most commonly held myths surrounding this prolific software. This is what he had to say.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO SOLVE EVERYTHING IN PHOTOSHOP?
Of course not! In the 20 years of interacting with Photoshop as an onlooker, a user and developer – with my years at Adobe – it has evolved to become the go-to solution for engineered technical solutions to photographic problems. However, while this will work on a wonderful demonstration file, when you try to use a quick fix in every-day, regular images – not a hope in hell. The difficulty is exacerbated because PS is seen as the only solution – it’s the main one and has been for a long time, and for 20 years it has been pretty much the standard package people would use to modify an image. It’s now assumed that whatever Photoshop does it’s got to be the gold standard and many people new to the industry take it at face value. In the past 20 years, demographically, it means about two-thirds of the people in the graphic design and photographic industry know only Photoshop, they don’t know a time before PS. Some cameras have a very low dynamic range and it’s like a special effect to try to get an image that looks like the reality of the intended shot, with highlight detail and shadow detail at the same time. The engineered solution by Adobe is to tell the photographer to carry a tripod around at all times, when requiring an image of a special effect such as HDR. They would have to take four or five shots, so obviously that limits what you do with HDR to probably 1% of the time. Then there is the workflow – to take all those images and put them together results in a really poor compromise at the end of the day. So the great picture becomes a feat of engineering that’s all very gratifying to technical people, but doesn’t result in an image that is very convincing. This proves Photoshop is not the place to go to solve everything in the world of imaging today. You can use Photoshop as an easy solution to many common problems but my point is you need to know the theory of how do it properly. Being lazy in the photography environment, saying “no I can fix that later,” is just unprofessional. When a mistake happens or circumstances mean an image has been taken incorrectly, there is nothing wrong in knowing you can go and fix it later. But most of the technical strategies used by developers to fix images leave the image looking fake. So, no, PS is not the answer to everything – knowing your profession, knowing your environment and knowing the skills involved in your working environment is the real answer to solving problems.
DO YOU NEED TO UPGRADE EVERY VERSION?
No, not based on features, you don’t. Adobe’s problem is that Photoshop is probably one of, if not the most developed piece of software out there, and has had some massive upgrades in the early versions. Each and every upgrade gets a huge launch because it’s a flagship product. There are many upgrades in the past that I look at and just shake my head in despair at the ‘new’ features that are supposed to inspire me to upgrade. It’s no criticism of anybody that this happens; it’s this dilemma of being 20 years into software which is already so massively developed. In the early days, version one to version two was a completely different programme, then version three brought us layers. We had been using Photoshop for maybe two to three years and suddenly layers appeared – that was mind blowing. You would have been mad not to upgrade then. Now when you look at the differences in each new version they seem less and less relevant to people’s true workflow. Of course, every new feature in Photoshop is valid, but do these improve the profitability of my business, give me something different to bring to my customer? No. The sad fact is that from my perspective, the last thing that happened to Photoshop that revolutionised the way I work was layer groups. Something as innocuous as being able to put layers inside a group, I can’t even remember which version it was in, either six or seven. It was freaky what that did to my workflow and the possibilities for retouching or manipulating, and Adobe didn’t even call it a feature! It wasn’t a retouching feature, it wasn’t like levels or curves suddenly got better, it was simply an organisational tool for layers. My view as an independent consultant is that you only spend money on your business when it has a direct benefit to your business. People buy into technology and many of them define the quality of their image by the camera that took the shot or the piece of software they used to do the retouching. Attend any big photographic organisational dinner or awards ceremony and stick an image up for a bit of fun and then stand by it and wait for people to say, “Wow, look at that image, is that yours?” and then they will ask, “What camera did you use?” They don’t want to discuss the inspiration or look at the lighting, the photographic or technical quality – they just want to know what camera I use, because they think that defines the image. Sadly that’s where we are with Photoshop as well; people would not sleep at night, I feel, if they weren’t editing their pictures with the very latest thing, so we buy into technology and generally make pretty poor decisions as to how often we upgrade. It’s the same with camera-backs and with all software. There isn’t a PS feature that I’ve used in the last month that hasn’t been in PS since version six. Everybody knows that when you have a very mature product you have got to find some way to encourage upgrades. Engineer obsolescence or force people’s hands. The biggest example of that was in the previous upgrade to Photoshop, where CS4 coincided with the Canon EOS 5D MkII and to read the new Canon RAW files you had to upgrade to CS4. The upgrade to the Adobe camera RAW reader didn’t work in CS3, it forced your hand, and nobody from a customer perspective responds well to that sort of arm-twisting. My advice is only upgrade if it makes financial sense, and if you will gain in your environment.
CAN YOU ALWAYS TELL WHEN AN IMAGE HAS BEEN WORKED ON IN PHOTOSHOP?
I would feel quite aggrieved if that were true. What I try to teach is the art or skill of manipulating images with Photoshop. I am probably the world’s biggest fan of Photoshop; because my biggest waking nightmare is to have someone look at my image and say, “Here, what do you think? Does that look like it has been Photoshopped?’ Fifty per cent of the images published today have quite clearly been badly Photoshopped. Many of the worst offenders can be seen at photographic awards shows. Oh my God, my first judging experience was utterly horrific, the proportion of images that were badly messed around with in Photoshop created an optical illusion that left you thinking, “I don’t know what’s wrong with that image but it looks totally fake.” The excessive use of skin softening, the excessive brightening of eyes, whitening of teeth, shrinking of people’s waistlines and other things are horrific, utterly horrific. It’s easy to say you can tell that images have been worked on in Photoshop. The skill is to know how to use Photoshop so an image doesn’t look like it has been worked on. The trick is creating an image which you know is better than it ever could have been on camera and still be 100% true to the natural range, gamma or light in the subject matter, giving a totally natural feel to the image, which is the skill of the retoucher. Obviously I would say that, being a ‘retoucher’ or ‘digital imaging person’, but there are more variables to consider – there is more theory involved, in terms of understanding dynamic ranges of printing presses; how the paper reacts differently to the dynamic range, which changes the palette of colours that I can use to represent that image. It just goes on and on. There is a large amount of anecdotal data you have to know to be able to make good choices when you are in Photoshop and create a good working practice which is theoretically based. You can’t wang – just picking up a slide and wanging it until your eyes are happy. Happiness is not in the wang bar. There is not one wang bar that I would use in its entirety without a mask or an alpha channel to have a more natural effect. It is true it’s becoming easier to spot a Photoshopped image these days, because there is less skill in the industry now. I believe that with good working practices, skill sets and theoretical understanding, photographers can create images without making it obvious they’ve been retouched and this is what I teach across the world.
IS RETOUCHING A NEW THING?
Clearly not; Photoshop is only 20 years old, and you must have four to five generations of professionals working in the industry now who don’t know anything other than image manipulation using Photoshop. Given the fact that there is not one feature in PS that would teach you the first thing about the theory of retouching, you need to have that information in your head to be able to come to Photoshop and use it properly. PS teaches you that all we have to do is wang a slide bar – which is fine if you don’t know any different. The focus of my teaching is relativity. Start from the base point, with RAW files being generally flat, lifeless, boring, colour subdued and unsharp. Any idiot could fall on a keyboard and make that look better, but to make the image the best it could be is something entirely different. That is really the basis of everything I do. One of the focuses on my website is that I show you what the convention is in Photoshop and then explain how to do it so much better. But I always demonstrate what Photoshop leads you to believe is good and compare this with my versions. If you’ve never seen what is possible with your image, then it is easy to be happy with Photoshop. It’s like when you buy a vacuum cleaner and call it a Hoover. It’s not made by Hoover as a company, but it has got that name attached to it and what it does. So, Photoshop is synonymous with image manipulation and people don’t believe that there was a world before PS. The reality is that the world before Photoshop was far higher in quality than today. That’s the truth for all sectors in the world of graphic arts, whether it’s graphic design, litho, scanning or photography. It was a professional environment then and you had to know the theory and the skills in your work to do a good job. Now there is no theory, it’s just about wanging. So no – retouching is not a new thing, but most people think it is.
IS PHOTOSHOP RUINING PHOTOGRAPHY?
The obvious answer I can give to that question is damn f***ing right it is. It’s ruining everything, unfortunately, from a purist’s point of view. The slightly more sensible answer is that in the days of transparencies, working in an agency, a repro company or a design company, you would get a series of transparencies from a professional photographer and then the retoucher or scanner operator – me – would work with the designer to choose the image that reflected the designer’s intention of how they wanted the image to be displayed on the magazine page. It was a very considered approach and at the start we worked with a good-quality transparency that was basically near-perfection. The transparencies had vibrancy, colour and contrast, and when the photographer did their job really well, my job as a scanner operator was the simplest in the world. I would press two buttons on my scanner – the buttons were to mimic and to copy the transparency. Once we had gone through the design process, a printed sample proof would be held up in a viewing booth with the transparency and the team would get together with the client to point out any error factors between the proof and the transparency. The transparencies were the gospel and what we were trying to match; we had to reproduce the transparency. No one in his or her right mind could ever take a RAW file from a camera and be happy. You cannot go click-print-happy – you have to go click-manipulate, or click-retouch, print and happy. It’s all about retouching, always has been and always will be. We start with RAW files today because of the way that cameras have evolved to being dependent on Photoshop.
There is an acceptance that the RAW file will need work and from a workflow or financial standpoint, the more hours you have to sit mucking around on a computer trying to turn your business asset into a saleable commodity, the less profit you make. Photoshop and its ability to create a whole number of special effects means that, following the line of least resistance, photographers are the worst retouchers. Just because you can take a picture doesn’t mean you are qualified to manipulate it and it would also be true to say that just because I am an image manipulator doesn’t necessarily qualify me to be a photographer. These are two completely different schools; they both involve the same subject matter – imaging – but have very different viewpoints. When you look at the world of portrait photography today you couldn’t possibly send an image to an agency or to a client without the skin being done, 10lbs being taken off somebody, getting rid of the bags under their eyes, whitening their eyes, whitening their teeth and all the other things that get done, which have now become normal. It’s now so normal that even my portrait customers know that’s what you call being Photoshopped.
The problem with Photoshop ruining photography is that the practitioners of photography, being people, go and do all this stuff for nothing. We have had about 20 years of digital photography and photographers running around the industry doing my profession for nothing and not valuing it as part of the skill set and process. They haven’t been passing that on to their customers and they have been letting their clients get it for nothing. Now the photography profession is wondering how they are going to make money in this industry. The answer is that you charge your customers for the time it takes you to do the job. If it involves you taking time to go off on a course and do things properly, then you upskill and increase the quality of your work – and your fee. So, yes, Photoshop is ruining photography, but it’s not just Photoshop, it’s people who are ruining the photographic industry, by reducing the value of good photography to its absolute limit. I listen to commercial photographers saying, “I’m working five times more hours and five times harder, with double the investment for a fraction of the money.” Well, you can see where that leads. Photographers need to work smartly and work with the technology, not be a slave to it.
Biography
Guy Gowan is a legend in the world of digital imaging, workflow and manipulation.
His seminars and DVDs sell out, he is constantly besieged by questioning followers and his unique approach and opinions set the agenda for manufacturers worldwide. Over the 25 years Guy has been in the industry he has been both an independent consultant and is regularly retained by clients such as Adobe, Apple and Wacom. He is a leading authority on retouching techniques. He started his career in 1979, at the age of 16, working in a darkroom studio, platemaking and processing film for litho printing.
In 1981 he began working with one of the first digital scanners as a senior retoucher. Six months later, at the age of 19, he became the sole operator of the scanner and his career in the world of retouching had begun.
www.guygowan.com
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