Friday, May 28, 2004, 12:08:40 PM, Alan wrote: AC> I really don't think anyone really cares what the original scene looked AC> like. Every photo we have seen in magazines have been heavily "enchanced" to AC> capture our attention. Just look at those super saturated National AC> Geographic photos! Btw, Auto Contrast seldom works for me. It has the AC> tendency to overdo.
Hi Alan, when you get into the Levels or Curves window, press the Options button to customise the way AutoLevels and AutoColour and AutoContrast work. I suggest replacing the 0.5% clipping values with something much smaller, 0.2% for really low contrast images or 0.1% (or less) for images where you get heavy clipping of shadows/highlights using the Auto command. This applies to Photoshop and almost all other programs using autolevels/... If I have time, I may get into this discussion of "reality". Perhaps later :) But some manipulation is inherent in the medium of photography, which is not real. It's not capturing whole reality (like some painters were afraid first time photography came out), it's about capturing its small slice. Good art uses any medium to its advantage, so photography benefits from reductionary approach, IMO. Just capturing a vista as the eye saw it is impossible (because eye sees in many many small movements, while it sees the photograph printed as a whole), and if anybody tried that (all the superlarge posters of waterfalls), it usually accounted to no art and no reality as well! Best regards, Frantisek Vlcek
