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TANGENTS

The Joy of Photoshop

BYIHTISHAM KABIR
The first time I saw Photoshop was in 1990 while attending a computer graphics conference in Las Vegas. Those days I printed my black and white photographs with chemicals in the darkroom. One of the most frustrating parts was the common practice of "dodging and burning," used for selectively brightening or darkening a portion of the photograph, by wiggling a tool underneath the enlarger as the photographic paper was being exposed. It was an ad-hoc process and hard to replicate. If you made a small mistake, you wasted a sheet of expensive photo paper.
The reason Photoshop struck me was because it had a software tool called
'lasso" which allowed you to draw a contour around an area within the photograph which you could darken or lighten with the mouse. This made "dodging and burning’ painless.
I was not ready, however, for using Photoshop in my photography. Back then, the technical quality (that is, resolution and sharpness) of digital cameras was much worse than film. Good digital cameras became available much later.
How things change! Photoshop use is so widespread today that it has become a verb. The programme was invented in the late-1980s by brothers Tom and lohn Knoll who sold it to Adobe Systems in 1989 in a lucrative transaction. Tom Knoll continues to work in digital imaging, fohn Knoll has since become a Hollywood guru and was head of visual effects on Mission Impossible 3: Ghost Protocol.
These days Photoshop (or a similar software package) has become a mandatory tool for anyone serious about images. After shooting, when a photographer selects a photograph to work on, the first step is called "post’ - short for post-processing.
This is a combination of steps that were once taken in the darkroom, including contrast and colour adjustment, cropping, dust removal and, yes, dodging and burning. Many professional photographers in the West outsource post to Photoshop operators in India.
The "before" and "after" photographs left show the effect of post. The overall contrast of the image has been improved and I "dodged" the eyes to make them prominent. This has enhanced the photograph. Back in film days, these corrections would have taken an hour or two in the darkroom. In Photoshop it took me less than five minutes.
Recently, I spent much time in two of Dhaka's
top photo labs printing photographs for my photo exhibition (ongoing at Home n Decor on Pragati Shoroni). All day, a steady stream of photographers and studio owners arrived with portraits, wedding photographs, old damaged photographs, etc in pen drives. They handed their photos to one of the Photoshop operators in the front room. Before being printed, all photos were "retouched." It took about ten seconds to make white hair black, fifteen to remove someone's double chin, and perhaps two minutes to restore damaged old photos. My photographs skipped retouching.
To me, a fine but solid line exists between post and retouching. Post brings out what is already in the photograph by enhancing it technically (eg, increasing the contrast.) Retouching is the deliberate change of the meaning of the photograph. This is a line I am very careful not to cross.
unvw.facebook.com/tangents.ikabir. My photo exhibition “Colours of Life’ runs until Feb 10 at Home N Decor, Pragati Sharani, llam-8pm daily (closed Wed.)