As I was shooting today something came to mind. This question is really for those of us who have spent (or still spend) a lot of time in the darkroom.
Although one could ever dispute that programs like Photoshop and Lightroom have given photographers of all skill levels a powerful tool to tweak and manipulate photographs, providing options that are either very difficult or even impossible to do in the dark room.
But here is my question, have programs like PS and LR made us lazy? What I mean by lazy is are we willing to live with things in the image that we can later fix in PS that we would not have been able to do 20 years ago? Back then you had to change viewpoints, deal more with color temperature (resorting to using the right kind of film and/or CC filters) and chose shutter speed and aperture for proper exposure. This was especially important in slide film where the exposure latitudes were not nearly as wide as with color negative film. Color negative film could tolerate a fair amount of overexposure, but color slide film would just go clear with no detail whatsoever left.
I know I have caught myself doing it too but fortunately my firewall is still intact enough and that voice tells me to stop and revert back to the film days and try to get things as right in the camera rather than relying on fixing them afterwards. Over the years I would say I have honed my PS skills to what are considered above average, as least as far as a photographer goes, but to be honest I hate having to spend a lot of time on an image where more attention to detail before the shutter was tripped would be better than hoping I can fix it later in Photoshop.
Your thoughts?
