One of the ongoing arguments (discussions?) within photography is: how much is too much when it comes to digital manipulation?
Almost every tourist town in the west has at least one high-end gallery owned by a local photographer. When I started decades ago, there was a great gallery in southern Utah I used to stop by to get new ideas. One year, right when serious photographers were beginning to switch from film to digital, I dropped by and was shocked to find that the prints on display were suddenly highly manipulated, with garish colors and unnatural effects. It was almost as if one were to suddenly find that one of the 'old masters' had started selling paintings on black velvet! But at the time, that hyper-digital look was brand new, and apparently that's what people were buying.
A photographer friend of mine related a similar story, but with an important difference. He had visited a gallery in another southwestern town, and found that the local photographer had added full moons to many of his iconic canyon images. My friend knew they had been added because he had previously researched the astronomy himself. The photographer admitted that he'd 'photoshopped' the moons, but noted that he sold more of his work that way.
Even with film, there is really no such thing as 'photographic purity' because of all the steps between the actual scene and a final print. I once had a conversation with someone who worked in a studio with Ansel Adam, using a 'single hair' camel hair brush to remove imperfections from prints. But of course what used to take hours now takes just a few seconds on a computer.
So how much is too much? I probably fall toward the 'purist' end of the spectrum in that I use Lightroom in much the same way that the old film photographers used tricks in the darkroom: to make the final print look as good as possible. Somewhere toward the middle of the spectrum are photographer friends of mine who intentionally give their images a more processed, artificial look......but to the point where it is obvious to the casual viewer that it is not a simple photograph. Where I start to cringe is when the image is so artificially processed as to be garish, or simply dishonest. I still see lots of full moons added to save boring skies, or colors and detail so over-the-top that one is reminded of a black-light poster from the 1970's, Obviously the digital enhancement horse is out of the barn, but hopefully it can be kept in the corral with a combination of honesty and taste.
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