The Seven Deadly Sins of Photography 3 - The Editing Extremes

These posts are intended for both young and seasoned Pakistani photographers, but others can also read. This is the first post of the series. No example photos will be included in these posts, however you can post in comments :)

3. The Editing Extremes

Perhaps this sin is the most tempting and old as photography itself. You can take a picture now, and think you can enhance it later :( without a single time crossing your mind at the time of click the thing how you plan to do so.
Great photographers, when felt challenged by their subject and scene, had in mind exactly what sort of development they will perform in order to overcome the difficulties posed by the scene itself. Good days!
Now you open your hard drive one lonely day and find the ugliest looking pic.. and start an editing software (called hereinafter Photoshop or PS which would mean any standard image manipulation program) with the aim to make it pretty and post-able. These people have no idea that you can PS a photo from corner to corner in one transformation. These include histogram compression, curves, saturation, vibrance, sharpening etc etc. Instead you have every test development plugin by smallest of businesses, scripts written by amateurs to learn another thing and the crappiest of software which does more damage to quality and metadata than your imagination. No wonder you use all of it in every single frame .
These people start with burn dodge tool, go through plugin sewers and scripted slums and finish it off by defaults or auto corrects.. Then they make selections and masks. Every thing means less and changing the background means more.. a skill, an honor. One can see every known effect like soft glow, sparkles and bubbles (yes, on pictures of teen boys with pink lips). Most of these are wedding camera "mistries" (mason). Some are simply fearing rejection either in start of at some point of their photography career. Others are simply ignorants of their abilities and their camera's capabilities.
It is pertinent to mention that the new breed of software (LR) that focus on photography (not on graphic artists), doesn't have all these flaws... The earlier you get rid of nasty habits the better it would be. More and more can and should be said but lets ..
Remember : Process the whole, or dont do process at all.

Previous posts of the series

1. The Crop
2.The Equipment Owner

The seven sins of Photography - 1. The Crop

These posts are intended for both young and seasoned Pakistani photographers, but others can also read. This is the first post of the series. No example photos will be included in these posts, however you can post in comments :)

Bad, distasteful and poor cropping

How rare it is to see something in 2:3 or 3:4 (i am being kind with Pointers and Shooters, because i was once myself) from most newcomers or sometimes even "seasoned" photographers? With the explosion of cameras, camera-phones and even SLRs in hand of every other person, there are more  examples of average or bad photos than ever.

Cropping a photo after taking it can be helpful at the time of print. Or if you use a high end SLR with more effective pixels, you can sacrifice a bit of detail for composition.

Panoramas are just another way to commit this sin. Seriously, do you think to print it on The Great Wall of China? How can you effectively view a 1:10 on any screen or print in world? You can not.

But i think, square crop i.e. 1:1 is the exception, only for the fact it challenges your composition skills and results in slightly artistic images on film cameras.

If you camera doesnt have enough optical zoom, don't try to show off bigger moons and giant ants by cropping the non interesting parts.

Please respect the proportions!