Post Processing Pictures - Good or Bad??

Well, this is a bit of a rant or a step-up on my soapbox. There are a few sites that post-processing of pictures has gotten completely out of hand imho. Pictures that seem to be on these sites have morphed into something you may see in X-Plane/MSFS and look plastic from so much processing. AARGH!

I tend to do very little to my pictures and that is why I really enjoy this site. Honest pictures are posted that I have no doubt would be rejected elsewhere. I get to see planes that I have never seen via pictures taken by photographers using xteme to simple equipment.

I guess this is an age old argument—to improve or leave original—and I guess I tend to be on the original side of the runway.

Stepping down from my soapbox now.

Dave.

I, myself, agree. I am a fan of aircraft, I want to see the aircraft, not a bunch of artsy fartsy BS, there are better websites for such things.

Ditto. I’ll also add that I don’t like music, especially hard rock and rap, as background for airplane videos. The sounds of the engines is the best music for airplane videos.

I agree with that as well for videos, nothing is better music than a aircraft engine, jet or recip, either one.

And this basic argument has been going since photography was invented.

I completely agree about the horror of some of the grotesquely over-proccessed images that just completely ruin an otherwise decent photo.
However, on the flip-side, I see a lot of horribly UN-proccessed images on this site which are just as bad. For example there are an alarming number of under-exposed photos uploaded to this site.

Case in point, this promising image from this week’s “Staff Picks” section:

Now why didn’t the uploader just spend the extra 10 seconds that I did to make it look more like this?:

Just one of my pet-peeves I guess. :confused:

@tiptank

VERY NICE!!! Well worth a few minutes. I suspect most people that upload photos either have no way to post process or simply don’t want to. I usually sharpen and boost color when needed, but changing hue/color I never do.

As another reply stated, this line of thought(I don’t want to call it an argument) started with the first photographers.

Thanks

Guess I should clarify my response. Lighting up a dark exposure is okay. When I originally replied I was thinking of people who add stuff to the picture to make it look entirely different or “artsy-fartsy”.

I tend to always allow Adobe Lightroom to do a white balance check. If I like it then ok… Same with auto-correct mode. If I like, that’s ok too. I’m seeing way too much HDR stuff here which to me is just tacky, un-natural. I’ll adjust exposure when I need to or maybe sharpen just a touch…

Ron