- Bonjour mesdames and messieurs.
In this video I want to talk to you about whether or not
retouching is cheating.
I know this is a very, debatable subject.
I have different viewpoints on it.
I want to give you my view point on it.
(dramatic music)
All right, so I made a little presentation for you
to give you my honest viewpoint about whether
retouching is cheating or not.
And, you're completely okay to not agree with me,
leave me a comment, tell me what you think,
I will read your comment with pleasure.
This is the G Master Lens 85 millimeter 1.4,
one of my favorite lens.
And it has this ability to give a very strong bokeh,
like this photo I shot with it, where you only have
like the whole foreground is completely blurry,
then it's very sharp in the middle and it's blurry
in the background.
Now, unless you really have some eyesight issue,
no human beings is ever gonna see things like this.
It's a trick.
We are tricking, we are doing an optical illusion
using a lens.
Now how is that different from the software?
Well let's carry on.
Also, don't forget to smash that like button.
It really helps me so that other people can see the video,
tell me what you want to learn.
I make two videos per week, I read every single comment
and if you did not subscribe,
please subscribe to my channel.
This is another photo shot with an 85 millimeter 1.4.
I put some LED lights in the back, you know you get this
great crazy bokeh.
That's not something that's normal, the lens created that.
So is that cheating, or is that not cheating?
This is a photo of Frans, my good friend and you can see
how blurry it is behind him.
I mean, unless you really have some eyesight issues,
you are never gonna see that in reality.
Again, a trick done by a device.
Not by the software, but by a lens.
This is an ND 1000.
Now the ND 1000 is gonna stop the light from coming in,
and it's gonna do some really cool long exposure effect.
Check this out.
This is a one second exposure.
You can see how the wave looks like,
almost like oil painting.
Is that natural?
No.
It's a device, it's an object that created
an optical illusion.
All of that to create an emotional impact.
This photo is an ND, I put the same filter on this photo.
It's a 92 second exposure.
90 second or something of a sunset so you can see
the stretchy clouds.
Is that something normal?
Is that cheating?
It's using an ND filter.
This one is a three minutes long exposure.
Now when you do a three minute long exposure
and the sky is white and the water is kind of white.
It becomes white after three minutes.
So is that cheating or is that not cheating?
You are getting my point.
My point is, we are artists and we are trying to create
an impact, an emotional impact.
It doesn't matter whether you use a lens,
or a filter to create an emotion or 20 hours in Photoshop,
you are still trying to create an effect,
of course, I am a fine art artist, I'm not a reporter,
you know, like a war reporter who needs to make sure
the photo is very accurate for people to make sure
that what's happening there is real.
You know, I remember when there was some riots in Paris
and people were cheating by putting a small fire
in the foreground and shooting it.
So it, the photo was not retouched,
but it was not a representation of the truth.
And you see that a lot in the press.
Well, I'm a fine art artist, I guess a lot of you guys
are fine art artists,
we're just trying to make people happy.
We're just trying to share the beauty of this world.
So if you use a lens, or if you use a filter
to create an impact, is that cheating?
I don't think so.
This is again, this is pano I did,
every exposure is two minutes, you know,
and all I did was use an ND filter.
I converted it to black and white,
but I didn't really use the software for that effect.
It was all about the filter.
One last, this is a long exposure of Notre Dame.
Beautiful Notre Dame, it was a great,
this one is I think a minute and a half long exposure.
You get this really stretchy cloud effect.
Look at the water.
It's completely flat.
It does not look like this in reality.
This was like five seconds of retouching.
The whole trick was done with that filter.
Now, I'm gonna talk to you about my best selling photos
in galleries and in case you don't know this,
I've been working with the Yellow Korner Galleries
for the last six years now.
I've got over 80 photos for sell in over 82 galleries
around the world.
It's, I'm very proud of that and I'm gonna walk you through
some of my best selling photos of all times and you will
see some like this one.
This is one of my early work, it's very saturated,
it's kind of over the top, and this was a lot retouching.
I changed the sky, I did a lot of dodge and burn,
it doesn't really look natural, but never the less,
it's still one of my best selling photos.
This one is another one of my best selling photos,
and it took me literally five seconds to retouch this.
Open the shadows, bring down the highlights,
a little bit of brushing, but I used a preset on it,
I think the whole thing took me like four seconds.
This one was a little longer, it was an HDR but still
was very fast to retouch, it was, I just wanted to get
all the details from the sky and from the city.
It's one of my best selling photos in gallery.
This one was literally 10 seconds of retouching.
Nothing to it.
It was shot at 2000 ISO
and it's also a great selling photo for me.
This one was, took me a lot of time because I brought
in some sky, I made a layer with CPI and I brushed in
back some of the colors.
Took me quite some work.
This one was very fast.
This one was a few seconds of retouching.
And this one, which by the way,
was picked up by the state of California,
to represent Hollywood around the world,
by the official state of California PR department,
this one took me a lot of time, I actually did a video
on this, you'll find the link below on how I did this photo,
but I added some clouds, did some dodge and burn,
cropped the photo.
I did quite some work on this one.
But here's the point.
Whether you spend 20 hours on the photo or whether you
spend five seconds on the photo, it does not matter to me.
What matters to me is do people enjoy your work?
Now I'll give you one trick that I've been saying
over and over on this channel which was a big realization
for me a long time ago and that is that when I started
using Photoshop and Lightroom I started going crazy,
adding clouds, and having really crazy contrasting clouds
or super saturated photos, just like a kid having a toy,
I was playing with it.
And some of the photos had a great impact,
but when I would show a photo like this to somebody,
the first response was always, oh, you're good at Photoshop.
And I hated that.
I didn't want people to know that I'm a retoucher,
I want to be a photographer.
It took me quite some time to get that photographing right.
Yes, I enhanced it with sky replacement, but still,
the original frame is kinda cool.
So I discovered the work of Peter Lik,
awhile ago, and I walked into many of his galleries,
and he apparently sells hundreds of millions of dollars
of fine art sales.
I know there is controversy about him,
I love his work.
I mean, I have so much for a man who's capable of opening
at 14 galleries on his own.
And I am sure he does a lot of Photoshop retouching,
but, the thing is, see, that he nails his color really well.
What I find and that was kind of what was wrong in my work,
is that if you have a sky like this one for example,
although it was done with an ND filter that sky is
really not natural, very magenta.
People, because it doesn't look natural will respond to
you Photoshopped it, but if you show a photo like this
there is chance that they will respond oh what a great sky
because it's just a good representation of the colors
that were there.
So just be careful when you're retouching,
to not put too much contrast on the skies.
And by the way, I made a video just on that called
the five biggest mistakes in Lightroom.
Check also the link below.
Last, if you feel bad about retouching your photos
or spending a lot of time retouching them,
let me introduce to you to one of my mentors, Ansel Adams.
Ansel Adams was the king of black and white.
He is known as the adventurer landscape photographer,
the best of all times.
And, he is known for this kind of really strong
black and white with great contrast of the National Park,
this is Point Dome, this is the Tunnel View.
I mean, he is really, really good, you know?
But, I don't know if you know this,
this is Ansel Adam's son, which was interviewed
by Mark Seliger, a good friend of mine,
and he was walking through Mark
the way he was retouching his photos.
What he's holding in his hand
is what we call the dodge tool.
The dodge tool, basically the idea is that we're projecting
light against a positive paper and if they wanted to make
something brighter, they would dodge the light.
It would stop the light from meeting the paper,
therefore making it brighter.
So, that's him showing the different tools.
He had something calls the zone system,
I'm not going to go into it very much,
but the idea is that different parts of the photo
had different value of luminosity and it was achieved
through darkroom retouching.
This is another tool that they used to use to make
something a little brighter.
It's the reverse, so, the light only hits where
there is a hole, making this part brighter.
But the problem is that if they didn't nail the retouching,
you know once it was exposing the photo,
they had to tear down the paper and re-do it
until they did it right,
and sometimes they had to do it 20 or 30 times.
It was a lot of work.
Way more than I ever spent on any photo ever.
This is one of the most famous photos from Ansel Adams.
It's called Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico.
That's the original negative,
and that's the one that's being sold in gallery.
You can see the sky is much darker, look at the clouds.
Look the before, look how the clouds is more contrasty.
Look at the village that's almost invisible
and how it is there.
And so, it's not just Ansel Adams,
this is some old archive from Magnum,
where you can see this beautiful photo of Audrey Hepburn
and you can see all the retouching darkroom instructions
on the left side to make what you get here
on the right side.
Same thing with this photo of James Dean in New York,
Times Square under the rain.
Or this photo, of Muhammad Ali.
Every round is just an instruction of like plus one stop
minus two stops, heavy, heavy retouching.
Heavy dodge and burn.
So, here is my thought.
Retouching is an art, it's been around since photographing
was invented, so don't feel bad about using it.
Concentrate on the effect you create on your photography.
Do people enjoy your work?
Do they get some emotion out of it?
That, all that matters to me.
Tell me what you think down below in the comments
and don't forget to watch my video,
The Five Biggest Mistakes to Avoid in Lightroom,
starting right now.