Computers and Digital Photography

Hi folks. I saw an article that proposed that we as committed digital photographers could do everything we could possibly need to do using only a tablet or a smartphone. This struck me as so incredibly inane, that I had to look more closely.

Is the assertion true? Yes, with some significant caveats.

Let’s suppose that your use of a digital camera is dominated by a smartphone as your tool of choice. If that is so, the user data tells us that well over 95% shoot in JPEG mode and that over 80% (estimated) never edit anything, and that those who do edit might crop a bit or apply some filters. The very small percentage who take things further want to remove something from the picture.

For those people, the statement from the magazine that I shall not name is accurate.

However, if you participate in this channel, the probability is very high that this is not you.

While smartphone cameras have improved significantly, part of the art of photography is about making artistic choices. Choices including depth of field, point of focus, angle of view at time of image capture, and followed by some processing workflow after capture that is more than slapping a filter on, or just removing an offending lamp post.

Smartphone photography does not allow for flexibility in angles of view unless the camera unit has multiple lenses, or you are satisfied with the quality loss that is engendered by cropping. To be fair, quality is lost on any digital negative if cropping is performed. However the sensor in a smartphone regardless of pixel count is very tiny. The surface area of every pixel is microscopic and unless the image is exposed with lots of light, making large prints without significant processing is going to look lousy.

Oh, never mind, most of these people have no interest in making prints or even seeing images on anything larger than a smartphone screen. So image quality is not a success criteria.

Now when it comes to the more regular readers and listeners, you are not picture takers, you are photographers with some level of commitment to your creativity.

While our goal should always be to get things as right as possible in camera, we are just like our forebears who understood that the darkroom was an integral part of their photographic process. We have moved past the chemical darkroom in the digital context and moved to the digital darkroom.

Whatever you may think about Adobe the company, they have done a great deal of excellent work to take the digital darkroom beyond the capabilities of the chemical darkroom, without ignoring what came before. Adobe Photoshop is really the anchor on which the digital darkroom was built. While you and I now have viable alternatives to Photoshop, which is accurately named for its design intent, but was not built first for photographers at all, it has become synonymous with the digital darkroom and despite all the spin and marketing and disinformation, it requires a decently powerful computer to operate to its fullest extent. While there may be Photoshop something or other apps for tablets and smartphones, they are not Photoshop and never will be.

Photoshop was never a great general editor. In the pro domain, that was initially held by Apple’s Aperture, a superb product that was summarily executed because the serious photographic professional was not at the time, a desired target of Apple. There were likely other reasons, but for its time, Aperture killed all competitors. Except that it would not ever run anywhere but on macOS. While the music and film industries are more accustomed to specific hardware requirements, that has led to excellent alternatives to Apple’s two professional applications, Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X. Both are excellent but only run in the Apple ecosystem. Aperture could have remained there but it was murdered.

So other companies got into the simple editor business, and Adobe was one who got in early. Many assume the Adobe Lightroom Classic takes from Photoshop but in fact it is the other way around. Adobe Camera RAW takes the Develop module from Lightroom Classic. While Lightroom Classic still includes a number of modules that the majority never use, the Library for organization and the Develop module for powerful editing are its standouts. Adobe confused the world by naming its web/mobile/tablet/phone app Lightroom. It bears no actual similarity at all to Lightroom Classic and was clearly designed and built with no communication with the Lightroom Classic team. That other Lightroom is not for photographers, it is for picture takers, a substantial audience that is not us.

If you dislike Adobe, and there are countless reasons to do so, there are excellent alternatives from Affinity and Capture One as well as DXO for serious, professional grade editors. Affinity Photo is the closest to Photoshop in photographic functionality. But we cannot equate the two because there is a lot in Adobe Photoshop that has nothing to do with photography, instead focusing on layout, preparation for mass media, volume printing not on a home printer and being a pixel level editor. With the features today in Adobe Lightroom Classic, Affinity Photo, and Capture One, the need for Adobe Photoshop even for the committed photographer continues to diminish.

Yet however excellent these tools are, at the core, they require a computer to operate. One could argue that a smartphone is a computer and that a tablet is a computer. Which is true until the parameterization that says must run compute and memory intensive application is applied. Then they don’t fit.

And that is why I write this. A digital photography magazine releases a click bait title claiming that computers are not needed for digital photography any more and creates no value by doing so, unless confusion and disorder is the goal. So I say, eff them and the horse that they rode in upon. If you are committed to your work as a creative photographer, you still will want and need a computer, be it a laptop or a desktop that has tremendous processing power, memory availability and storage access. Such tools are integral to your success, and anyone who says differently has an agenda that is not being fully disclosed, or that is running contrary to your goals.

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