That was the question today as a fellow photographer and I discussed the merits of photo retouching.
It came about because I had shared a proof-of-concept for a scene that's coalescing in my head. I expressed concern over how I'm going to hide some rigging in the photo, and my colleague said, "Just clone it out."
I was immediately repulsed by the idea of "just cloning it out", and this reaction surprised me, to be honest. After some thinking, I realized that I don't have a problem with post-production retouching; rather, my beef is that I don't want to do it. It's my personal preference, rather than a rejection of all retouching. (So don't start hating on me just yet!)
Currently I'm doing all my post work with Darktable, because it allows me to smoothly move from shooting to sharing with minimal middlemen. (Try saying that five times fast!) While Darktable does have a spot removal tool for minor blemishes, cloning out a C-stand is beyond the limits of its capabilities.
Darktable also strokes my OCD nature. It never actually modifies the original RAW file; it writes all its changes to a database and a sidecar file. This means that I only have one file, and the entire chain of modifications is applied each time the file is loaded. No change is ever permanent. It's an elegant solution. However, if I export the file to the Gimp to do serious retouching, I've either changed the original file, or made a duplicate. This has long-term scalability implications to my workflow, so I'd need a darn good reason to do it.
The second problem is one of flexibility. If I find solutions to problems during the shoot, before the shutter opens, then I know the problem is solved. If, on the other hand, I say, "I'll just fix that in post," I run the risk that for some reason, I won't be able to fix it in post. (For example, what if the background is too complex to allow me to clone something out?) That means a reshoot. And the idea that I might have to set up and schedule an entire shoot a second time because I didn't take five minutes to fix something on the day makes me sad.
And finally, I personally think it's more clever, in this world of high-tech, to find a low-tech solution to a problem. For example, instead of supporting something on a stand and then cloning out the stand in Photoshop, what about suspending the object using fishing line? The trick is to keep the line from showing up in the photo, but that's just another challenge to solve. In this world where we see so much retouching (and over-retouching,) I want to point to my work and say, "See that amazing thing? That's not 'shopped."
So there.
