Jim's Journal: To Enhance An Image in Photoshop or Not to Enhance

Or, to ask the question another way - what's cheating?

Interestingly, I was explaining this to someone the other day - photoshop just replaces the development/printing stage in the photography workflow. Enhancing colours, making alterations to your exposure, cropping the image - all tools that have been available to film photographers for years.

Of course, you can do a lot more in photoshop too - and at times, that can be well worthwhile.

In one case of mine, a wedding group shot of about 17 people, I'd taken around 10 shots of the same scene, same pose - knowing that I'd have to take at least that many just to get one where everyone was looking in my direction and not blinking. Well, I should have shot a few more - in every one of those photos, someone was blinking. However, through the magic of photoshop, I was able to paste a head from another photo into one where everyone else was looking right at me, eyes wide open. It's a bit beyond image enhancement, but was it cheating? Perhaps, maybe, a little. But I think it was justified.