Photoshop Giveth, and Photoshop Taketh Away

Black-Eyed Susans, In the Lomographic style

Yes, you can remove lots of ills with Photoshop, but you can also use the same tools in reverse to add those same ills in were they didn’t originally exist. This photo is an example of that.

This looked like it would make a great Holga shot. But, I didn’t shoot it with a Holga, I shot it with the Nikon Coolpix P5100. So, I identified the characteristics that a similar image taken with a Holga might have (vignetting, barrel distortion, chromatic aberration a.k.a. color fringing, edge blur, grain) and added them with Photoshop’s lens correction tools and some other filters.

I should note here that if there is such a thing as digital lomography, this is not it!

Had I set my P5100 to manual exposure (1/125 sec., f/8), set the color to “vivid”, attached an inexpensive, non-Nikon wide-angle converter lens, and turned off the LCD, it might be considered digital lomography. But as it is, this is simply digital manipulation in the lomographic style.

Now, if I were to have used the Nikon FC-E8 Fisheye Lens with the P5100, and digitally cross-processed the image using L*a*b*, that would have been different. Then I would have wound up with an image like this:

Verona Park

No trickery here. This is pure digital lomography. The optics took care of the fisheye, just as if I had shot film, and the false-color effect is indigenous to the L*a*b* color space...the ability to invert colors but not tonal relationships.

Many new digital cameras have the capability of creating lomographic-style images through the use of electronic filters. Is this digital lomography? In my opinion, no. It’s the same as doing it in photoshop, only you’re doing it in the camera. It’s not an optical effect, a characteristic of the lens, shutter, aperture, or body; it’s just digital manipulation.

But please, by all means have fun with these new cameras and Photoshop’s filters; after all, it’s all about the art. Just don’t try to pass off a photoshopped image as lomography. Know the difference.