 So many people are enabling photographers to bry into this idea that the act of taking photograph itself doesn't matter, that the alchemy at the heart of the creative process doesn't deserve to be respected. In simple terms, photographers are putting the horse before the cart. Oh, I do hope it's not Photoshopped. That was such a throwaway line from a recent chat where I was talking about the photography of John Bathos. That sparked a flood of comments on the video about what's wrong with Photoshop, and would it really matter if it was made in the Lightroom? It would be very hard to answer those questions fully in the comments section, so I thought it would be easier to make a video explaining what I believe is wrong with Photoshop when thinking about the art of photography. How's it, how's it? You know, Photoshop, Lightroom, whatever, you know, let's just call them the digital workspace, are all extremely detrimental to photography. Okay, I could see everybody's just getting like, oh my God, already, all right, so I better get my flame-proofed suit on. But perhaps it would be better if I quantified that, that that workspace can be detrimental if it's not used correctly. So it's a shame then, of course, that so many photographers don't use it correctly, and I appreciate it's not really their fault entirely, you know, after all, large portions of the photography industry are devoted to parting photographers from their money in return for a one-button solution, which will instantly turn their boring images into stunning, insta-worthy photographs that your friends are going to love. Of course, none of this, none of this is new, filters and effects have been around for as long as photography, and for just as long, people have been using them to make sparkly, glittiness fall over bad photographs in an attempt to have it look interesting or pretty. So why is this a problem now? Well, the act of creating photograph starts with us being inspired to create an image of something that we see, to interpret it in our own unique way. We see something and we consider this scene, we have an idea about how we'd like the final image to look, and then we photograph in such a way that we have a solid foundation on which to start the next step of the creative journey, and then, traditionally, you would have taken the film that's been exposed and you would process it to fit various things and then you'd have a negative, a good negative from which you could make a great print that you could then polish that final image with things like dodge and burn or what have you, and even though we work in predominantly a digital environment now, the process is still the same. Now, granted, okay, it's a fairly simplistic overview of that creative process, but you can see that it's like a pyramid where one step stands on another until we get that pinnacle of a great image. Don't pay respect to any of those steps and then the whole thing just comes crashing down, and this is what I see happening all the time, especially a lot of newer photographers who are just starting to explore photography. They're being fed this lie that the actual act of taking a photograph doesn't really matter too much, you know, shoot raw so that you can fix your exposures later. Lightroom will straighten wonky horizons if 100% straight horizons is exactly what you want. You know, Photoshop can remove anything, so don't worry about being mindful of what's in the background, a little thing is growing out of people's heads. Just get as quickly as you can into your preferred workspace so you can start flicking through your library of effects and turn those boring images into Instagram gold. That's the issue, is that people have been told that it doesn't matter. As you can't make a good print from a bad negative, so too. You can't just take some little arbitrary snapshot that you've given no thought to slap on an Instagram filter and think that it's going to be great. It's like trying to polish a pile of poo-poo. The digital workspace has been an absolute godsend, of course, and it's opened up photography to more people. It has been a catalyst for new forms of creative expression that wouldn't have been even possible 20 years ago. It's improved my photography greatly. It's allowed me to express myself in a better and more concise way, because I'm a terrible printer, right? But like a reverse Pandora's box, after all those good things have flown out, there at the bottom is laziness. Now, as always, this is an opinion, and yours, of course, may differ. Now, if you'd like to share your thoughts and comments, please feel free to. But I'd like you to just be respectful of everybody else's viewpoints and have a grown-up discussion about this. Photography is an exercise in creative experimentation. You have ideas, you plan them, you try them out, and you see what's working. You see what's not working, and then you adjust. V. Spears started one of her series of portraits, photographing everything in black and white. And it was only kind of like when she got about halfway through, that she decided it wasn't really working. And she was stuck with all these images and decided what was she going to do with them. So she decided rather than chuck them out and start over again, that she would colour them all by hand. And yes, she did use Photoshop to do this. And that's, of course, the point. She had an idea, she worked through it, and she used Photoshop as a tool Anton Corbain could only afford one type of film when he was younger. So because he was working both outdoors and in dingy music venues and things like that, he had to go and buy the fastest film that he could. So he photographed with an idea of how his images would look as a final thing, right? So they and other photographers had an idea in their head. And they tweaked things in the process from image-taking to final print to help bring that photograph alive. And it's care and consideration, it's that care and consideration that was in place at the start. Not just photographing with no respect for the final image and being lazy and slapping on a lot of effects afterwards. That's where the issue comes in. John Bathos creates images with care and consideration. He is an artist, he gives it some thought. So when I saw his clouds image, because it looks like an effect that you would so often see these days flicking through an Instagram feed, I had a knee-jerk reaction to it because it's something that people use to create lollipop pictures. It's an effect people can go and buy today on Graphic River and believe it's a fast track to creating good photographs. And this is at the core of my issue with the digital workspace is that it's so many people are enabling photographers to bry into this idea that the act of taking photograph itself doesn't matter, that the alchemy at the heart of the creative process doesn't deserve to be respected. In simple terms, photographers are putting the horse before the cart. Create photographs and use actions and effects if you want to, but use them with purpose, intent and thought.