Once again I feel compelled to make a short industry post, despite my disdain for such things.
The camera industry is experiencing a dip. I discussed this here, the reasons are not complex or difficult to understand.
What is interesting about this, to me, at the moment, is this. There are many pundits out there on the webernets who will happily tell you why the dip is there, and what camera companies can do about it. Their answer is always the same:
Camera companies are stupid, and have not been listening to professionals and serious photographers, i.e. to me, and this is the cause of their troubles. If they would only listen to me, or if only they had listened to me back then, they would be fine. The solution, going forward, is for them to listen to me.
This is completely wrong, of course. When you're selling consumer gear, the opinions of professionals and serious amateurs are largely irrelevant. They're not your market. For the last decade, Canon and Nikon have been focused on selling cameras to moms, to people who Just Want Pictures. Sure, they talked to serious photographers and professionals, those people sometimes have ideas and there are products in the lineup aimed at those people. Still, the target was the people who just wanted pictures.
To claim that the camera industry is stupid, and that fill in the pundit is much smarter than the camera company is, is ridiculous and insulting. These companies have been insanely successful, and remain insanely successful, in a tough, competitive market. Of course they didn't execute perfectly, but they executed well enough. They rode the digital wave to something like a five-fold increase in market size in something like 10 years. That's incredible for a market of this size and maturity. That's mind boggling in fact. It's like GM suddenly figuring out how to sell 10 cars to every person on the planet.
The market shift they're seeing now is probably not a shift the major camera companies were capable of following, any more than the buggy whip manufacturers could have started building cars.
In particular, listening to some dolt with a website is not the answer to their problems. The answer is probably figuring out how to capture a larger share of the shrinking market as it adjusts, while downsizing to fit, without destroying the company (or the camera division).
And no, I am not pointing fingers at any one, or any two, pundits. There's a bunch of these people out there, bleating the same silliness.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Weightless
This is a theme I've visited a few times in the past, here, for instance or here. The label "social media" will turn up a bunch more.
Time was, pictures had weight. Paintings, of course, were for posterity. They were for the unending future, for tomorrow but also for future generations, a permanent object. Photographs, on film, were also for the future. A instant was frozen, so we'd have that to look at next year, ten years hence, or when we were old. We took pictures of the kids so we'd have those moments in the future, and so our kids would have those moments to look back on when they were grown.
Pressing the shutter button cost something. A few cents for film, a few cents for processing, a few cents for a print. A factor at least as important and perhap moreso: the print bore the weight of permanence, of time. Susan Sontag remarked, glibly, that we did not photograph important moments, but that moments became important because they were photographed. While there's some truth to that, there was still a minimum bar of inherent importance the moment had to pass. We did not photograph our lunch, our coffee, that guy's hat. At least, not very much. There's a burden imposed on us when we commit some scene, some viewed object, to the permanent record, and we felt that as much as we felt the literal cost of film and print.
I've said most of this before.
With the idea of "use" in hand, though, we can push a little further. In past times, especially in the era of film, the "use" for a picture was almost always tied up in permanence. We made pictures because we wanted to use them, in some long-term way. The idea of taking a picture so that we should show a picture of a thing to our friends, and then throw the picture out, was absurd. Photographs might not be oil paintings, but they were certainly not so lightweight that we'd use them once and then discard them.
Besides, with the delays inherent in processing and printing, it would have been far too tedious.
Now, taking a picture is free. Sharing it is frictionless and instantaneous. And as a consequence, we are freed from the weight of time and of permanence. Photographs are free to be ephemera. They are an extension of our sight, we share a photograph thoughtlessly, trivially, not as an object in its own right, but as glimpse at the underlying thing. When a photograph is weightless and frictionless, the "use" can be anything at all, however trivial.
Mike, over on ToP, asks if we're in the middle of a new fad for photography. I think we're in the middle of something much bigger and more important, a sea change in the way we relate to photographs. Photographs are weightless and frictionless now. They float, they move, the appear and vanish. We are OK with that. This younger generations treat that as normal.
As artists, we seem to lean toward making things with weight. This probably explains, to a degree, the minor trend toward film, wet plate, and other permanent methods. It's a backlash against that weightlessness and ephemerality. The artists seeks to distinguish his work from the ephemera, to distinguish his work as permanent, as massy, as not trivial.
Here's a closing thought for the day: Why? If modern art has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that art need not be permanent. Ephemeral is OK. Tino Seghal, Banksy, many others. What can you make of that, in your own work?
Time was, pictures had weight. Paintings, of course, were for posterity. They were for the unending future, for tomorrow but also for future generations, a permanent object. Photographs, on film, were also for the future. A instant was frozen, so we'd have that to look at next year, ten years hence, or when we were old. We took pictures of the kids so we'd have those moments in the future, and so our kids would have those moments to look back on when they were grown.
Pressing the shutter button cost something. A few cents for film, a few cents for processing, a few cents for a print. A factor at least as important and perhap moreso: the print bore the weight of permanence, of time. Susan Sontag remarked, glibly, that we did not photograph important moments, but that moments became important because they were photographed. While there's some truth to that, there was still a minimum bar of inherent importance the moment had to pass. We did not photograph our lunch, our coffee, that guy's hat. At least, not very much. There's a burden imposed on us when we commit some scene, some viewed object, to the permanent record, and we felt that as much as we felt the literal cost of film and print.
I've said most of this before.
With the idea of "use" in hand, though, we can push a little further. In past times, especially in the era of film, the "use" for a picture was almost always tied up in permanence. We made pictures because we wanted to use them, in some long-term way. The idea of taking a picture so that we should show a picture of a thing to our friends, and then throw the picture out, was absurd. Photographs might not be oil paintings, but they were certainly not so lightweight that we'd use them once and then discard them.
Besides, with the delays inherent in processing and printing, it would have been far too tedious.
Now, taking a picture is free. Sharing it is frictionless and instantaneous. And as a consequence, we are freed from the weight of time and of permanence. Photographs are free to be ephemera. They are an extension of our sight, we share a photograph thoughtlessly, trivially, not as an object in its own right, but as glimpse at the underlying thing. When a photograph is weightless and frictionless, the "use" can be anything at all, however trivial.
Mike, over on ToP, asks if we're in the middle of a new fad for photography. I think we're in the middle of something much bigger and more important, a sea change in the way we relate to photographs. Photographs are weightless and frictionless now. They float, they move, the appear and vanish. We are OK with that. This younger generations treat that as normal.
As artists, we seem to lean toward making things with weight. This probably explains, to a degree, the minor trend toward film, wet plate, and other permanent methods. It's a backlash against that weightlessness and ephemerality. The artists seeks to distinguish his work from the ephemera, to distinguish his work as permanent, as massy, as not trivial.
Here's a closing thought for the day: Why? If modern art has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that art need not be permanent. Ephemeral is OK. Tino Seghal, Banksy, many others. What can you make of that, in your own work?
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Fine Art Photography
This is a pet peeve of mine.
When someone talks about "Fine Art Photography" they seem, usually, to mean decor. Technically decor is covered by the term Fine Art, so it's not actually wrong, but for some reason it still rubs me the wrong way. Is your giant landscape in the approved primary color palette with a splash of complementary color so it will go in with the expensively designed living room really all that Fine? It's not like it says anything about anything, it's just pretty.
I don't object to pretty. If people who were doing serious Art also called their photographs Fine Art, perhaps I wouldn't be irritated. Artists generally don't, as far as I can tell. Fine Art is reserved for expensive decor, usually big.
Art is something else entirely.
When someone talks about "Fine Art Photography" they seem, usually, to mean decor. Technically decor is covered by the term Fine Art, so it's not actually wrong, but for some reason it still rubs me the wrong way. Is your giant landscape in the approved primary color palette with a splash of complementary color so it will go in with the expensively designed living room really all that Fine? It's not like it says anything about anything, it's just pretty.
I don't object to pretty. If people who were doing serious Art also called their photographs Fine Art, perhaps I wouldn't be irritated. Artists generally don't, as far as I can tell. Fine Art is reserved for expensive decor, usually big.
Art is something else entirely.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
P.H. Emerson
For reference, Peter Henry Emerson was a photographer working in the last decades of the 19th century, bringing the ideas of Impressionism into Pictorialism, roughly speaking.
I have run across two or three descriptions of Emerson's ideas of focusing, and how to produce an impressionistic effect in the camera. Writers all copy from one another, not as much as people on the Internet, but a lot. The result is that the references I have seen make more or less the same vague reference to the sketchy theories about how eyes work that Emerson was basing his thinking on, and then state briefly that he used "differential focus" to make his pictures soft. Sometimes they mention putting the subject a little out of focus.
There are a couple of points worth making here. Emerson's procedure is considerably more detailed and sensible than these writers make out, and Emerson was right even if his Eye Science was wrong.
The procedure is pretty simple. Focus on the subject, with the aperture wide open. Then, using a combination of narrower apertures (but use the widest one possible) and swings of the camera back, place everything except the subject out of focus to a greater or lesser degree. The use of the swing back may not be familiar to all photographers, although the use of wider apertures surely is. If you don't immediately know what rotating the back of a large camera relative to the lens does, read up on the Scheimpflug principle.
The degree to which Emerson suggests you should put things out of focus is very specific. It is to reproduce as far as possible the impression you have when looking at the scene. You place things which are not the subject out of focus not because of some theory of the eye, but because you are not looking at those things in the scene.
Finally, Emerson suggests putting the subject itself very very slightly out of focus, and only sometimes, to render it more natural looking. This is arguably an error, but even that is not quite clear to me.
Why is Emerson right?
Emerson's Eye Science may have been wrong, but it turns out that he had a pair of these things himself, could use them, and thought about how it felt to use them to look at things. This, not the flawed Eye Science, is essentially what his method is based on. I assume he put the Eye Science into his book to back up his theory, not as the actual source, but that is naturally just a guess.
When we look at an object we perceive that object as sharp, as clearly delineated and detailed. The rest of the scene isn't soft or out of focus, per se but it is out of our attention. The idea of sharp versus soft isn't really all that meaningful in speaking of what we perceive, in any case. What we "see" is a mental construct, bearing only a loose relationship to the actual image captured by the eye. We "see" it all as "sharp" but the stuff in the periphery is less within our attention, it is more extrapolated, interpolated, and just plain made up by the visual cortex, and we're not looking at it.
Imagine, if you will, an 8x10 print made with a normal lens. This print captures a fairly wide scene, one which if we had seen it ourselves, we would have been filling in a lot of periphery with the machinery of peripheral vision. Much of the scene, at any moment, would have been outside our attention. We take this whole thing, and cram it into a small object, a print, right in the center of our vision, where we can "see" the whole thing at once.
This is profoundly unnatural. Put in these terms, it's a little surprising to me that we can make sense of this at all, but we do. I think an argument can be made that the straight photography guys, and in particular the f/64 people, are characterized mainly by a willingness to embrace this unnaturalness. This is a sort of natural endpoint for photography, we trace nature with total accuracy, and then cram it, in a single chunk, into your visual cortex to see what happens. It's not natural, but it's definitely photography.
Emerson correctly perceived that this presents us with a problem, We're going to "see" the scene in the print all at once, we're going to "see" it much more as a single object, with all the elements of the scene as details of that singular object. Presented with the same scene in the real world, we would "see" it quite differently. Perhaps we would perceive the subject fully, in a moment, and only gradually over seconds or even minutes come to perceive the details of everything in the scene.
Emerson proposed quite an elegant solution with his differential focusing. It's not quite modern shallow depth of field, I think Emerson would have had no truck with bokeh. Things were to be soft, but the structure was always to be preserved. We might not "see" the surrounding scene in as much detail as we perceive the subject, but we are aware of it. We know there's a road to the left, a cottage behind, and a lake in the foreground. We just don't care, because we're looking at the girl. So, the photographer should not throw the rest of the scene into a mass of blur, but only soften the surrounding material, and render it less detailed and less important in the print.
In the modern era, I think we might more closely approximate the effect Emerson was looking for by taking a sharp picture, and then rendering a blurred layer over it varying the transparency of that layer from one area to another. Almost transparent over the subject and almost opaque over unimportant background, but never fully transparent or opaque. It is worth noting that extremely high-end modern portrait lenses do almost exactly this, at shocking expense.
In the modern era, especially the acolytes of f/64, we use other constructs to manage the viewer's attention. The use of contrast, saturation, leading lines, and so on, can also help the viewer sort out what to look at. There are a bunch of principles of composition and design which can help to arrange the masses within the frame in some sort of hierarchy of importance. Degree of softness is but one, but it's a neglected one.
Emerson's solution was pretty elegant, and really nothing like "just make it all soft, you know, impressionistic."
I have run across two or three descriptions of Emerson's ideas of focusing, and how to produce an impressionistic effect in the camera. Writers all copy from one another, not as much as people on the Internet, but a lot. The result is that the references I have seen make more or less the same vague reference to the sketchy theories about how eyes work that Emerson was basing his thinking on, and then state briefly that he used "differential focus" to make his pictures soft. Sometimes they mention putting the subject a little out of focus.
There are a couple of points worth making here. Emerson's procedure is considerably more detailed and sensible than these writers make out, and Emerson was right even if his Eye Science was wrong.
The procedure is pretty simple. Focus on the subject, with the aperture wide open. Then, using a combination of narrower apertures (but use the widest one possible) and swings of the camera back, place everything except the subject out of focus to a greater or lesser degree. The use of the swing back may not be familiar to all photographers, although the use of wider apertures surely is. If you don't immediately know what rotating the back of a large camera relative to the lens does, read up on the Scheimpflug principle.
The degree to which Emerson suggests you should put things out of focus is very specific. It is to reproduce as far as possible the impression you have when looking at the scene. You place things which are not the subject out of focus not because of some theory of the eye, but because you are not looking at those things in the scene.
Finally, Emerson suggests putting the subject itself very very slightly out of focus, and only sometimes, to render it more natural looking. This is arguably an error, but even that is not quite clear to me.
Why is Emerson right?
Emerson's Eye Science may have been wrong, but it turns out that he had a pair of these things himself, could use them, and thought about how it felt to use them to look at things. This, not the flawed Eye Science, is essentially what his method is based on. I assume he put the Eye Science into his book to back up his theory, not as the actual source, but that is naturally just a guess.
When we look at an object we perceive that object as sharp, as clearly delineated and detailed. The rest of the scene isn't soft or out of focus, per se but it is out of our attention. The idea of sharp versus soft isn't really all that meaningful in speaking of what we perceive, in any case. What we "see" is a mental construct, bearing only a loose relationship to the actual image captured by the eye. We "see" it all as "sharp" but the stuff in the periphery is less within our attention, it is more extrapolated, interpolated, and just plain made up by the visual cortex, and we're not looking at it.
Imagine, if you will, an 8x10 print made with a normal lens. This print captures a fairly wide scene, one which if we had seen it ourselves, we would have been filling in a lot of periphery with the machinery of peripheral vision. Much of the scene, at any moment, would have been outside our attention. We take this whole thing, and cram it into a small object, a print, right in the center of our vision, where we can "see" the whole thing at once.
This is profoundly unnatural. Put in these terms, it's a little surprising to me that we can make sense of this at all, but we do. I think an argument can be made that the straight photography guys, and in particular the f/64 people, are characterized mainly by a willingness to embrace this unnaturalness. This is a sort of natural endpoint for photography, we trace nature with total accuracy, and then cram it, in a single chunk, into your visual cortex to see what happens. It's not natural, but it's definitely photography.
Emerson correctly perceived that this presents us with a problem, We're going to "see" the scene in the print all at once, we're going to "see" it much more as a single object, with all the elements of the scene as details of that singular object. Presented with the same scene in the real world, we would "see" it quite differently. Perhaps we would perceive the subject fully, in a moment, and only gradually over seconds or even minutes come to perceive the details of everything in the scene.
Emerson proposed quite an elegant solution with his differential focusing. It's not quite modern shallow depth of field, I think Emerson would have had no truck with bokeh. Things were to be soft, but the structure was always to be preserved. We might not "see" the surrounding scene in as much detail as we perceive the subject, but we are aware of it. We know there's a road to the left, a cottage behind, and a lake in the foreground. We just don't care, because we're looking at the girl. So, the photographer should not throw the rest of the scene into a mass of blur, but only soften the surrounding material, and render it less detailed and less important in the print.
In the modern era, I think we might more closely approximate the effect Emerson was looking for by taking a sharp picture, and then rendering a blurred layer over it varying the transparency of that layer from one area to another. Almost transparent over the subject and almost opaque over unimportant background, but never fully transparent or opaque. It is worth noting that extremely high-end modern portrait lenses do almost exactly this, at shocking expense.
In the modern era, especially the acolytes of f/64, we use other constructs to manage the viewer's attention. The use of contrast, saturation, leading lines, and so on, can also help the viewer sort out what to look at. There are a bunch of principles of composition and design which can help to arrange the masses within the frame in some sort of hierarchy of importance. Degree of softness is but one, but it's a neglected one.
Emerson's solution was pretty elegant, and really nothing like "just make it all soft, you know, impressionistic."
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Mediocrity
Inspired by smogranch again.
So many photographers, new or experienced, seem to aspire to mediocrity. That's what they're aiming for, not even what they're actually doing. We see this all over. "How can I produce this effect" or "how does so-and-so light his models" or "where was so-and-so when he shot that". The goal seems so frequently to be simply to copy someone else. This is a useful learning experience, but it's not a good end goal.
In the first place frequently people aren't copying anything particularly good. The number of guys out there shooting scantily clad pretty girls on beaches is insane, and there has never been a picture of a swimsuit model on a beach that was worth a damn. How can I shoot a wedding, so the album looks like every other crappy bunch of plastic people. How can I shoot headshots that look like all the other crappy mugshots out there. How does Terry Richardson do it.
In the second place, even if you're aspiring to someone who is or was truly excellent, you are not that artist. Your copies are unlikely to be as good. The best you can do is copies of someone else, and what you're probably going to do is mediocre copies of someone else.
Aim higher. Aim for your own vision. You're never going to be excellent if you're just trying aping other people, other looks.
Study them, practice the techniques if you like, it'll all go into your mental machinery and help drive your own inspiration. That's great, that's even powerful, and maybe even necessary.
It is not the ultimate goal.
Keep your eye on the prize: your own way of seeing, your own vision for what pictures ought to look like.
So many photographers, new or experienced, seem to aspire to mediocrity. That's what they're aiming for, not even what they're actually doing. We see this all over. "How can I produce this effect" or "how does so-and-so light his models" or "where was so-and-so when he shot that". The goal seems so frequently to be simply to copy someone else. This is a useful learning experience, but it's not a good end goal.
In the first place frequently people aren't copying anything particularly good. The number of guys out there shooting scantily clad pretty girls on beaches is insane, and there has never been a picture of a swimsuit model on a beach that was worth a damn. How can I shoot a wedding, so the album looks like every other crappy bunch of plastic people. How can I shoot headshots that look like all the other crappy mugshots out there. How does Terry Richardson do it.
In the second place, even if you're aspiring to someone who is or was truly excellent, you are not that artist. Your copies are unlikely to be as good. The best you can do is copies of someone else, and what you're probably going to do is mediocre copies of someone else.
Aim higher. Aim for your own vision. You're never going to be excellent if you're just trying aping other people, other looks.
Study them, practice the techniques if you like, it'll all go into your mental machinery and help drive your own inspiration. That's great, that's even powerful, and maybe even necessary.
It is not the ultimate goal.
Keep your eye on the prize: your own way of seeing, your own vision for what pictures ought to look like.
Art is all Subjective Anyways
It drives me wild when people say stupid things like "Art is all subjective anyways" and "you can't define Art."
Both of these statements are completely false.
Art isn't subjective, it's intersubjective. Language and Money are also intersubjective, in roughly the same way. We don't agree, completely, on the definitions of words. We don't all have the same relationship with money, we don't all think about money in the same way. But we agree on enough stuff to get things done.
When you don't "get" some piece of art, that doesn't mean it's crap. It means that you're not part of the group that shares the relevant subjective experience. If you don't speak Spanish, this doesn't mean that Spanish is bullshit. If your corner store won't accept Euros, it doesn't mean that Euros aren't money. Get over yourself.
Art isn't even hard to define. There are lots of definitions out there, several in every dictionary. Before you get all shirty about how there are too many definitions, so you still can't define it, I point out that there are just about that many definitions for other words and yet nobody stands around like a dolt claiming that you can't define "Cat".
These things aren't even hard, and yet we see photographers mumbling around about these things like imbeciles every day.
Both of these statements are completely false.
Art isn't subjective, it's intersubjective. Language and Money are also intersubjective, in roughly the same way. We don't agree, completely, on the definitions of words. We don't all have the same relationship with money, we don't all think about money in the same way. But we agree on enough stuff to get things done.
When you don't "get" some piece of art, that doesn't mean it's crap. It means that you're not part of the group that shares the relevant subjective experience. If you don't speak Spanish, this doesn't mean that Spanish is bullshit. If your corner store won't accept Euros, it doesn't mean that Euros aren't money. Get over yourself.
Art isn't even hard to define. There are lots of definitions out there, several in every dictionary. Before you get all shirty about how there are too many definitions, so you still can't define it, I point out that there are just about that many definitions for other words and yet nobody stands around like a dolt claiming that you can't define "Cat".
These things aren't even hard, and yet we see photographers mumbling around about these things like imbeciles every day.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Juice
P.H. Emerson was adamant that one should never manipulate the photograph after shooting it. You must, he felt, shoot from nature with at most modest interference, and then you can manage tonal placement through development, and that's it. No burning and dodging, no erasures, no enhancements, nothing. He did ask people to pose, but used only actual people doing the things they actually do. Emerson felt that manipulating the negative or the print made you simply a bad painter.
He's got a point. Gursky is a painter, and a pretty good one. Between Emerson and Gursky, well, pretty much everyone else falls in there. So, of course, it's a spectrum. I manipulate pretty heavily, and am ok if Emerson chooses to dub me a poor painter from beyond the grave.
More specifically, though, Emerson felt that manipulations sucked the life, the juice, the vitality out of a picture. A photograph begins with a certain potent reality, due to being a true and accurate transcription of certain phenomena. Manipulating that may well improve some things, but it seems to me, usually does suck some of that juice from the picture.
We're probably all seen walkthroughs of "my post processing process" where some idiot starts with a pretty terrible picture, and then photoshops it gradually but determinedly worse and worse. Each stage of this bozo's process makes the picture palpably worse.
What's more interesting are the walkthroughs where each stage appears to make the picture better, but the result is worse. Our hero might straighten the horizon, and then clone out a little group of trees that is distracting or out of balance, and may warm up the colors to make the picture more appealing, and so on. Comparing each stage with the previous stage, we think "yeah, I see, that is an improvement" but when we finally compare the end result to the original, we are unsatisfied. The original feels better.
This is partly due to the fact that at each stage we're focused on the thing the artist is doing. Why yes, the little group of trees was distracting, and now they are not there, so we're not distracted -- but the whole picture, which we are ignoring -- has suffered. So we lend too much value to the change.
Then again, I think there are optical effects in play here. The group of trees may have altered the light falling on another object nearby, and now the light feels off. There are, at least some of the time, subtle optical effects that are rendered incorrectly by the process. We miss, in the step by step, any actual damage that gets done to the picture.
Finally, there can be end up being an unreal sense of too much perfection. This is most obviously seen in overly 'shopped portraits. Each effect is not too much, sometimes skin really is that smooth, sometimes eyes really are that brilliant, sometimes faces really are that symmetrical, but the overall effect is that of falseness. No face is that perfect, the sleekly plastic. We sense that it cannot be real, because it lacks the tiny flaws and imbalances that the world is filled with, made out of.
Somehow, this all adds up to a sense of wrongness, of discomfort, a feeling that the juice is gone from the picture.
Me, I paint, but I either paint a lot, or a little. If I'm painting, I'm painting. Work the picture until it fits with what my imagination loves. If I'm not painting, I'm not painting. Clean up a little this and that, but don't go nuts. Keep some of the juice.
He's got a point. Gursky is a painter, and a pretty good one. Between Emerson and Gursky, well, pretty much everyone else falls in there. So, of course, it's a spectrum. I manipulate pretty heavily, and am ok if Emerson chooses to dub me a poor painter from beyond the grave.
More specifically, though, Emerson felt that manipulations sucked the life, the juice, the vitality out of a picture. A photograph begins with a certain potent reality, due to being a true and accurate transcription of certain phenomena. Manipulating that may well improve some things, but it seems to me, usually does suck some of that juice from the picture.
We're probably all seen walkthroughs of "my post processing process" where some idiot starts with a pretty terrible picture, and then photoshops it gradually but determinedly worse and worse. Each stage of this bozo's process makes the picture palpably worse.
What's more interesting are the walkthroughs where each stage appears to make the picture better, but the result is worse. Our hero might straighten the horizon, and then clone out a little group of trees that is distracting or out of balance, and may warm up the colors to make the picture more appealing, and so on. Comparing each stage with the previous stage, we think "yeah, I see, that is an improvement" but when we finally compare the end result to the original, we are unsatisfied. The original feels better.
This is partly due to the fact that at each stage we're focused on the thing the artist is doing. Why yes, the little group of trees was distracting, and now they are not there, so we're not distracted -- but the whole picture, which we are ignoring -- has suffered. So we lend too much value to the change.
Then again, I think there are optical effects in play here. The group of trees may have altered the light falling on another object nearby, and now the light feels off. There are, at least some of the time, subtle optical effects that are rendered incorrectly by the process. We miss, in the step by step, any actual damage that gets done to the picture.
Finally, there can be end up being an unreal sense of too much perfection. This is most obviously seen in overly 'shopped portraits. Each effect is not too much, sometimes skin really is that smooth, sometimes eyes really are that brilliant, sometimes faces really are that symmetrical, but the overall effect is that of falseness. No face is that perfect, the sleekly plastic. We sense that it cannot be real, because it lacks the tiny flaws and imbalances that the world is filled with, made out of.
Somehow, this all adds up to a sense of wrongness, of discomfort, a feeling that the juice is gone from the picture.
Me, I paint, but I either paint a lot, or a little. If I'm painting, I'm painting. Work the picture until it fits with what my imagination loves. If I'm not painting, I'm not painting. Clean up a little this and that, but don't go nuts. Keep some of the juice.
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