Where to find unaltered photos?

Hi,

 

Photography is something new and very exciting to me. I learned a lot from

this site and I found the posted pics amazing! the only caveat is we never

know if the pic is real or it have been altered by graphic softwars. I am

working on my photography skills and am really interested into looking other

people raw work (ie no post processing, not even levels and colors). Any input

on where to look?

 

Tkx, Sam.

We live in the digital age, and that can be a good thing. When shooting in RAW, post processing is strictly necessary to take control away from your (possibly dumb) camera. Remember, the camera is tweaking contrast, saturation, sharpening and a host of other functions if you let it. There's no such thing as an unprocessed digital image.

Many folks on photo.net who are either new to photography or new to digital editing will upload before and after versions of their photos. However I'm not aware of any search method for finding these specific types of photos.

 

I'm old school, boring, non-artistic in my usual approach. I'll attach an example of my typical editing, which usually consists of cropping, a few global tweaks, a selective edit or two (in this case the eyes so they don't get lost in JPEG compression).

 

There's also a "Where's Waldo?" puzzle in there. Can you spot it?<div></div>

There is no such thing as an un-edited photograph - never has been, even in the analog days. Starting with the development of the film you alter the outcome - temperature, time, agitation, etc. all play a part in that. Then you use an enlarger to tweak the print - dodge, burn, filter settings, etc. In the digital age it is no different. I would never present a RAW picture because it is no good - I need to at least sharpen it, adjust levels and curves and probably do some local adjustments as well. I don't paste new skys in my pictures, or any other "creative" stuff.

 

I hear this same argument all the time from my friends - how can we trust any digital picture and my answer is always the same - you could never trust any analog picture either - just use Velvia 50 vs. Kodak Gold 100 and you'll know what I mean. Photography is a highly personal expression, not a copy of reality (although I do try to stay pretty close to reality).

Use raw, expose on the right side of your histogram, and what you will see is what everyone else gets. The images will be flat, will tend to look a bit washed out, and will probably look a bit soft, depending on how your camera sharpens. There are very good reasons for not showing unworked images.

Hi

A lot of the images on my page have been batch processed for friends to pick up and all i have done is sharpened them.

hope this is of some help

most are taken on a canon 20D

"...am really interested into looking other people raw work (ie no post processing, not even levels and colors). Any input on where to look?"

 

If by "raw work" you mean the raw data, you cannot see it because it is not an image -- same as exposed but undeveloped film is not an image. It must be post-processed, that is, it must be developed into an image.

 

If you mean the jpeg image made in-camera, that too is the result of post processing; this can be confusing because the parameters of the in-camera post-process are made before the exposure, either by default or by the various settings and modes available in the camera to the photographer. This is somewhat like how a film emulsion's characteristics determine the image developed.

 

Photography is making an exposure and then developing into an image.

You can't see an image until it exists.

Any photo that looks out of this world, surely is manipulated to be so. You know, you can

smell them right off the bat, I just never mind them as photography.

 

You cannot learn from post processing if you want to learn photography by itself. You are

absolutely right!

 

It is a sort of cheap artistic statement around here that all pics are manipulated. So what?

Even if you and no one else can ever see what passes as a photo here, it is still considered

one ...

 

The term graphic art has not penetrated to these fora yet. Everyone wants to be a photog.

Strangely perverse i find it myself, but so it is, Photo.net has been taken over by aliens

who LOVE photoshop ...

 

Be strong in this time of photography perversion and learn to shoot in camera. The best of

luck to you!

Juergen is right on the target. I own what is considered to be a 'professional' camera, a

Canon 1DS Mark I full-frame... and shoot RAW exclusively. Every frame, with no

exception, demands SOME adjustment. Merely getting the exposure between and well

expanded in the histogram NEVER guarantees a redeemable photo... it just means you're

exposure didn't challenge the sensor beyond its limits, that's all. Like film, and I've shot a

lot of it, post-production is a fact and necessity of photography... you're challenge: Adopt

post-processing techniques that reveal the exact image you saw at the moment the

shutter was pressed. Anything beyond that is 'artistic license'.

JUNEAU, AK.

In my mind, manipulated means doing something to the image while you evaluate what you are doing. Not manipulating means following exactly steps in a process which was determined long before you took the picture, (and over which you have no control), such as Kodachrome processing by a commercial processor.

"There is no such thing as an un-edited photograph - never has been, even in the analog days"

 

...sorry this is simply not true. I have spent 25 years shooting transparencies, firstly as a studio pro and more recently as an amateur...not none of them is changed in any way.

 

AND...apart from sharpening which is required with digital, it is perfectly possible to shoot digital without post processing, apart from the caveat of sharpening. The trouble is that far too many shooters take little or no care when they shoot with digi, so they have no choice but to bastardise the photo afterwards.

Do you plan to shoot black and white?

i've always wondered the same thing. why can't we just shoot "pure" photos...no pp of any kind. That's what I do right now (until I learn more pp that is)

 

But it just feels "purer" not to alter it.

before breakfast I only shoot RAW

Ton; Way too much information ! :)

 

I've gone back to basics; I draw pictures in the sand with a pointy stick... it's cheap, it's fast and no PP whatsoever.

99.9% of all of the images at http://web.mac.com/tmaher3 are un-edited..

Way back I posted some pages out of 1930s to 40s photomagazines about how to combine photos, manipulate them, and so on. In the days of wet-plate photography even, denser clouds from another negative would be inserted to spice up the picture.

 

Old post:

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00M5nk

More than a few respondents have said they do "no PP." If you are shooting digitally in jpeg mode, you're right- You aren't doing any PP. Your camera is though...

And to add to what Robbie said, if you are shooting slide, you chose your post-processing results when you bought the film and chose Velvia instead of Sensia.-jeffl

To add my <.02 to Jeff, Robbie, JDM, Patrick and Juergen, anyone who thinks that he has ever seen an image that was not "processed" is ignoring the reality of photography.

While it's true that any kind of developing or processing does introduce some kind of changes (yes, even film selection), I'm pretty sure that you aren't looking for quite that level of untouched originality. You'll probably need to look for shooters around you or start your own collection.

 

The problem with the web as a source is most people for reasons of the time involved in upload/download and the difficulty in scrolling around to view "original" resolution files, etc., will have done some kind of processing, if nothing else to get the image down to a size that doesn't clog the web up and down-bound. That in itself will change things some. So for example, pretty much everything on my Pbase gallery would have some processing just to make it a reasonable size. Most of them will also have had maybe some cropping, some adjustments to contrast, color, sharpening, etc. I think to one extent or another that's pretty true of most of what's out there.

 

OTOH, if what you are looking for are from camera samples, some of the camera review sites like Dpreview and Imaging resources will have their test files available and these will show what they got out of the camera during their review process. Now these aren't artisitic originals comparable to some later evolved shots, just shots shot to the same conditions for comparing to other cameras.

Sam, don't look at my pages. Every image is processed to get the max out of it by whatever means possible. (Not that I usually achieve anything close to the max)

Sam, part of anyone's photography skills includes post-processing if a digital camera is

being used. Given that, different people employ post-processing to varying degrees, and I

think what you are looking for is the minimum necessary to get the resultant image to

look as similar to what the eyes saw as possible (keeping in mind that our eyes can

process a much wider range of light than can film or sensors). In that way, you can look

more closely at the natural light that was available, composition, depth of field, shutter

speed, and other factors that were chosen by the photographer the moment the shutter

was opened to obtain a really great photograph. Most of my images fit the "minimally

processed" category, as do a majority of images that I see in the landscape forum. Those

that don't fit this category because they have received "extra" processing usually stand out

like sore thumbs. Folks who think their heavy processing is going unnoticed are like

cigarette smokers who don't think anyone can smell the tobacco smoke that is saturating

their clothing.

Consider some artifacts of the equipment that may have to be assessed in development: pincushioning, barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, perspective distortion, chromatic noise, luminance noise, antialias fuzziness...for starters.

 

After capture do you just look at your pics on the camera's lcd or do you print to media such as a web browser or paper? If you do, then you must prepare the file for devices that have their own limitations and requirements.

Thank you all for your answers, appreciate each and every input. Let me just clarify two things. I am not debating the artistic value of post processing. I am positive I will make use of these techniques before exposing my pics. I just need some references for what can we achieve without. By raw, I meant unaltered and not .raw format. Resizing, cropping, generic denoising, in-camera tonal adjustments (I know that each digital camera have its intrinsic gamma transfer function from CCD to PIC just like every film), and in-camera color mapping and saturation. All those changes are ok and I won't consider them post processing. Even if they are altering the look (to some extent) I know we can't take them out of the chain and hence they don't count for me. No camera pic can reproduce reality anyways... Terry, your pics are true eye opener to what one can do with only a camera. I would love to see similar portfolios...

 

Sam.