Whenever I visit a museum there is a game
I play. Because it is impossible to see all the exhibits
and appreciate them all in one day, I go with an agenda.
Ten years ago I had a day to burn in Washington and went
to the National Gallery.
The agenda, knowing that the National
had such a large collection of portraits, was to determine,
for myself, who the greatest portrait painter in history
was.
At the end of the day I had picked nine painters who
I thought might be contenders for the prize: Rembrandt,
of course, with his luminous and mystical images of ordinary
people; Rubens, who painted human lustiness like know one
else; And Renoir, whose women are so compelling and beautiful.
But it was one other that caught my eye and made me sit
down
and look. And, as I sat in front of the life-size portraits
of Anthony VanDyke, I felt a presence that did not exist
in the others.
The people he painted leapt off the canvas
and became real. It was under such a pretense that photography
began: to depict the presence of reality. Painters like
VanDyke produced works that appeared to be "super-real," even
over or underexaggerating form and color, but yet still lay
grounded in what is called "The Faithful Image," a
one-to-one correlation between what is represented and the
representation itself.
Photography accomplished that representational
correlation to a precise (but not exact) degree, and so
accurately that it was considered the visual "truth."
As a
result painters, from the middle part of the 19th century,
went looking for reality in other places: Impressionism,
Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and, in the latter 20th
century, a Postmodern sensibility that derives its pleasure
from a
lack of form altogether and a reliance almost totally on
conceptual content.
In the midst of all these movements photography
also wanted to be accepted as an art form, but, in order
to do so, was asked to relinquish (at least partially),
in the mid-1970's, it's strong suit of depicting the real
world
for a "patch" job, the combining of many images
into one, and joined the rest of the art world in the conceptual
box canyon it had ridden the dusty trail into.
With the advent
of digital imaging we are now presented with a "Virtual
Reality" world where everything is decidedly conceptual
and "almost" real. Of course, this is all a long
story made very short. Photography (Imaging) has come to
be synonymous with word Photoshop, the industry standard
digital image editing and manipulation software. This as
both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse because it promotes,
willy-nilly, the compositing of images, the mixing and
matching of many images into one - a montage, a "patch" job.
The height of this outrageous image manipulation exists
in the pages of a well-known national tabloid, where we
are
led to believe, absolutely, the ultimate absurdity—that
what is false is true. In addition, it fosters the idea that
conceptual "Virtual Reality" is a replacement for
the real, and may, indeed, be superior to it.
Other than the fact that this might be inherently dangerous,
the one consistent observation I have about "Virtual
Reality" is that it lacks real presence. On the other
hand, Photoshop, in its most important, yet least understood
role, allows us to take a digitized image and give it the
presence we saw during the moment of photographing. It
is better at this one task than any darkroom technique
ever known.
This idea
came to me only gradually, through experience, working
with both traditional and digital photography. Photoshop
is an
image editing software program made by Adobe Systems and
is part of the "closed-loop" lightroom digital
workflow that begins with an input image from a digital camera
or scanner, is transferred to a computer where Photoshop
resides and works, and finally, the finished image is output
to a digital printer.
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The quality, control, and archival
nature of this output are now superior to any traditional
photographic technology. Furthermore—and this is
the most important point—the image seems more real
than it did with traditional media.
I started to notice this difference
eight years ago when photographing jewelry. The metallic
gold and silver color and "substance" was retained
better in a digital image than with the traditional color
transparency. Gems seemed more lifelike and sparkled off
the screen, as they never did before.
I then began to find, with the output from the new Epson
photo printers in the late 1990's that the printed image
appeared more alive, more real, more full of life. I began
making color and Black & White prints that equaled
the tonal range of silver and dye prints, but the realism
of the digital print was superior. I began to ask why,
and the answer slowly, but effectively, arose from the
very foundation of photography itself : Light.
In both B&W and Color we
now have at our command, in Photoshop, complete control
of the light in an image. Before, with traditional media,
our control was limited to a minimum - burning, dodging,
paper grade changes, fill, and negative development.
But the two great bugaboos of the traditional darkroom
- local
contrast and desaturated highlight and shadow colors
- were barely solvable only by the few willing to master
the difficult techniques of masking and Dye Transfer.
The control of these difficult
light problems is literally at your fingertips in Photoshop
and the digital workflow. In Photoshop we now have complete
control over local contrast. We can manipulate the contrast
of any area of a photograph down to the pixel level. We
can show differences in the separation of light values
from 1%
off-white to 0% paper base and from 99% gray to 100% black
ink. If this isn't enough, we can also control the ambient
sense of the overall feeling of the light as it interpenetrates
the whole. In color, we can control precisely the chroma
(saturation)
of highlight and shadow colors, making them more vivid
and real than the unforgiving white highlights and black
shadows
we had with traditional media [see article in previous Camera
Arts issue about Uniform Chroma].
Over the next couple
of issues I'd like to share with you how these controls
work
and also introduce a new Photoshop workflow for photographers.
If we look at the history of photography and the great
pictures it has given us, it is truly the honesty of the
light that
has held the whole together and made the moment seem real.
Photoshop continues this promise - to depict the presence
of reality. Its tools to control this sense—the honesty
of the light—are its greatest contribution to photographers
everywhere. It is the light that produces presence, in
the portraits of Anthony VanDyke or in the field beyond
your
door.
The Master Print is an advanced
technical and aesthetic workshop that mines the attitudes
and skills necessary to produce a “Masterpiece.” By
understanding that great input is necessary to produce
great output we establish a grounding for the making of
a Masterpiece.
By understanding the attitude and commitment that create
the skills surrounding the Masterpiece process, we create
self confidence and competence.
By understanding the intuitive
and aesthetic concerns, we can create the subtleties
in a print that cause presence and luminance. We form a
sacred
place for ourselves.
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