The modern editing software makes it remarkably easy to adjust and alter photographic images. But how legitimate and valid are these adjustments?
This exercise was not only a helpful opportunity to practice the range of selection and adjustment tools available in Photoshop, but it also raised questions on the limits of a legitimate digital adjustment. What kind of adjustment could be considered legitimate and when does it reach the limit of a true representation of the image? What is the difference between an improvement and interpretation? And how far is photographer able to go when adjusting a photographic image?
For the exercise I selected an image of a young man photographed in Marrakesh. The strong shadows surrounding the young man attracted me to this street scene. The downside of this particular angle was that the face of the man was also in the shadow area. I set myself a task of making the adjustments to the image without compromising the truthfulness of the scene.
I started by selecting the image of the young man using a Quick selection tool (Adobe Photoshop). This was relatively easy as the image of the young man was quite consistent in terms of shadows and highlights.
Picture 1: Image before adjustments
The original selection included some shadow areas around the young man’s trainers and some highlighted background next to his white coat so I had to use Alt- function to deselect the extra areas, as shown on the following two images.
Picture 2: Image with the original selection
Picture 3: Image with the amended selection
