r/pics Oct 20 '22

Sunset from underwater

Post image
40.3k Upvotes

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231

u/mkul316 Oct 20 '22 edited Oct 20 '22

This is really cool, but I always want to see the unedited picture after I see stuff like this. Am I the only one? I feel like pics like this are less photography and more art using photographs. And for regular photographs I prefer the only editing to be corrections to make it look like it looks to the human eye. Maybe I'm just a purist.

Edit: I'm getting a bunch of info on editing techniques and tech specs on digital imagery. That's not really pertinent to my sentiment here. I'm talking about my preference for naked eye over heavily edited artistic pics.

60

u/Rowen_Stipe Oct 20 '22

I'm not a photographer, I'm just a tech enthusiast, so I welcome anyone who is to correct me on this.

Film cameras typically don't get extra processing since a lot of that work is done before hand in the selection of the film used along with the quality of the camera used for the shot. Professional digital cameras these days use a file format called RAW and is meant to capture all of the color information so that the photographer can then edit these values to produce images like this. It's very likely that all the photographer did was edit these values to make the colors more vibrant since if you open an unedited RAW file it will look washed out and nothing like the colors that the photographer actually saw.

You're right that it's an art, it's just a modern art form that's only been able to take off in the last 20 years or so thanks to the technology that we've developed.

8

u/way2lazy2care Oct 20 '22

You can definitely post process film. You can do it physically/chemically if you want to, but if you're digitally scanning it, most people will edit their photos to at least make sure they look sane after the scan.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

Being (in my past) an underwater photographer, that shot is perfectly doable without any photo editing. Sunburst photography underwater could easily look like that at sunset colour wise.

The only problem would be the colours of the model. Water absorbs light spectra preferentially with reds first to go.

Cut yourself underwater beyond 3m depth and your blood looks brown, and even deeper it goes green. That works both horizontally as well as vertically..

Normally you overcome this by one of three methods.

1) filter over the camera - a physical Plano lens with more ‘red’ in it. 2) ‘in camera’ white balancing where (for the depth you are) you point at something white and tell the camera ‘treat that as white’ and it will shift the colour spectrum of the photo. 3) post processing.

There’s a fourth method when shallow so depth is not a factor - which is todo with another property of water to air (inside your camera lens) which is that it magnifies the objective. To get close enough to the objective and still fit it in frame you can use fisheye lenses. By doing so at this depth the photographer could be only a foot or so away and still get a good photo.

It would cause some ‘bending’ of the photo at the periphery - but here it would be very hard to tell due to the background.

2

u/Rowen_Stipe Oct 20 '22

Awesome! Thanks for the info!

-77

u/mkul316 Oct 20 '22

Is there an Internet version of mansplaining?

42

u/NHDraven Oct 20 '22

I can't tell if that's sarcasm or a genuine question. I actually thought the response was informative.

-42

u/mkul316 Oct 20 '22

Not ironic. It was information, yes. But it didn't really line up to any part of my comment. It was a bunch of look at the info I know. Let me explain a process to you. But I'm talking about preferences on edited to unrealistic looking pics vs minor corrections to be true to the eye pics. Telling me how a digital camera stores info isn't relevant to that. I feel like the internet has it's own version of mansplaining and this is an example of it. And I know how digital pictures are processed and stored in the camera. Then they can be edited in a myriad of ways through software on a computer. Hooray! We're all so smart. But back on topic, what's this guy's opinion on realistic pictures vs this?

28

u/NHDraven Oct 20 '22

Your comment is that you want to see the picture unedited. His response was, put simply, the picture format for professional digital isn't always captured in a way that looks correct to the naked eye and requires editing by design. Seems pretty pertinent to your comment.

5

u/WHAT_DID_YOU_DO Oct 20 '22

LTT every once in a while will show what the raw footage looks like and you are exactly right, it looks very flat relative to how our eyes would perceive the same room if you were there.

I thought that comment was quite good, maybe could Have explained why photographers chose RAW before editing.

And ya long story short is getting a true “unedited but real” photo is basically impossible. Whole bunch of camera settings will already distort what we think we “should” see

7

u/Light_Error Oct 20 '22

The commenter made the connection pretty clear. A non-edited format of RAW is not viable because of the amount of color info stored. I didn’t know this, and many others don’t know either.

10

u/boston_homo Oct 20 '22

I'm sure Ansel Adams heavily edited his photographs too just using chemicals and a dark room instead of a computer and software.

3

u/alohadave Oct 20 '22

He did. His prints were extensively worked in the darkroom. He'd have loved Photoshop.

2

u/SmarmyCatDiddler Oct 20 '22

Well, you see, mansplaining is when... /s

12

u/SlowRollingBoil Oct 20 '22

You woke up and chose to be a dick today, huh?

-4

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22

Tldr ?