I thought this thread was going to be a discussion on how to properly use photoshop for editing reef pictures with workflow exemplars, etc. Talk about a bait-and-switch!!!
This isn't really the point of this thread, but it's important to me so I'm going to just start by saying that the term "photoshopping" is being misused in the hobby. It has gotten to the point where it is now synonymous with "over saturation" and/or "misrepresentation." I hear "photoshopping" and think of "post-processing," which I think is critical step in the process to get a good representation. That said, iPhones and the like have really come a long ways in handling aquarium lighting. If the term didn't take on such a negative connotation, I'd say that it would be awesome if every reefer and vendor were awesome at "photoshopping" because then we would get accurate color reproduction.
There was a comment at the beginning of this thread about monitors and the affect they have on the end result. I just want to echo that and say that monitor calibration makes a huge difference in the entire editing process and drastically changes what we see and what others see. For example, I stopped editing pictures entirely on one laptop after realizing that the end-result weren't very accurate (I still posted the pictures to the boards...but hey, I'm not selling anything!
). And, while I don't excuse vendors from ensuring that they put up accurate pictures, I think that we have to remember that there's a chance that the person's pictures look 100% accurate to them on their end of the pipeline. Granted, they should quickly realize they have issues if they're getting negative feedback from others...but that issue has been discussed so I'll leave it alone.
I also wanted to add to the discussion about the accuracy of an acro that was posted earlier (you'll all recognize it). I was there the day after they posted the initial thread and snapped this picture with my cell phone and slightly edited it with the phone's software to try and replicate what I saw in person:
You can be the judge. I'll will say that I've never seen, and probably won't ever see, anything like it in person again.
Last thing, "accuracy" is subjective when we're dealing with photography under reef lighting. I take and edit A LOT of pictures! My significant other loves the hobby too and she'll lean in while I'm editing and sometimes say, "that doesn't look exactly right" when I thought it was spot-on, or "wow, you captured that perfectly" when I'm slightly frustrated with how the picture turned out. It's an art, so don't expect everyone to produce the exact same image you would even if you had the same raw image file.
