Man of Honour
I try to do the minimum of pp whenever I can.
If you're not touching your files at all you're almost certainly not seeing anything in print/screen how you saw it with your eyes. There is a whole industry of colour management dedicated to helping that very process (amongst others), and not touching a single thing in post is not the same thing. Not to mention the wild variety of screen settings, papers, inks, etc.
If we're talking about digital, and you're shooting RAW (which you should be ), they are deliberately neutral to capture the maximum amount of information, giving the user the greatest possible amount of leeway in determing the photos feel and tone when developing the RAW file. Just as we chose different films for their colour/tonal properties.
We need to get out of this post processing = impure stigma some people seem to be clinging onto. If anyone here has any experience in colour/b&w darkroom printing they will know how much you can alter the print from the same negative, even on a very basic level (I think a lot of this negativity is born of the digital age).
If people don't like larger manipulations (lots of healing, removing items, composites, etc) then that's of course entirely upto them, a matter of taste. The only problem is sometimes it feels like these comments somehow imply inferiority to these processes, as if they're really easy to do well. Good post-production is as much an art form in itself!
If you took it right in the first place you shouldn't have to fiddle with it
While that's true I just don't feel it's a photo anymore, it may as well be a CGI render because it doesn't actually exist in reality. Not saying there isn't skill involved but things like cloning big things (small stuff I can live with) out of photos just seems like loosing the integrity of the photo without jumping the gap into the creativity of creating art. IMO obviously.
By definition, photography means the art of taking a photograph. Nothing more, nothing less. Whilst I appreciate the power of the image editing tools we have at our disposal nowadays, their extensive use falls into the realm of digital art in my opinion.
This is why i hate the term post-processing. I say this every time, but 'fiddling in Photoshop' in my mind is just processing your photo. People saying post-processing sounds like they're trying to be overly technical. Argh it grates with me so much! /rantThe entire process of negative film processing is processing (shock horror!), you can dodgy, burn, push, pull, etc. !
This is why i hate the term post-processing. I say this every time, but 'fiddling in Photoshop' in my mind is just processing your photo. People saying post-processing sounds like they're trying to be overly technical. Argh it grates with me so much! /rant
Agreed with the points about shooting film. Processing () in Photoshop is just the digital replacement of the old tricks of the trade in a darkroom. Get over it!
Is it just me or has anybody else noticed a correlation between people who don't know PP and those that are anti-PP