cloning

i love to see beautiful images of nature and all that lives within it.. yet i am not sure how i feel about the cloning aspect of digital photography.. actually i am really not a fan and probably wont ever do it on my work.. i feel as though part of photography is not getting that perfect shot all the time. if you make the best image of you life and there is a branch cutting through the subject do you just clone it out. im not really sure about the whole issue and i dont want to come off like i hate all that clone. i just want to see how others feel about it so i can see the other side of the story and not be so close minded about the issue..anyway let me know what you guys think..
thanks or looking
jeffrey reynolds

Hi Jeffrey.

I don't think there's any single view on this. Each photographer works it out for their own sensibilities.

I will say however that there's a universal application and need for cloning: Getting rid of spots from dirty sensors! You usually don't know you have accumulated a new dust spot till you come back from the field and view the files full sized. Rule out that cloning, and there will be a whole new generation of UFO photographs.

Well, I don't believe there is a right or wrong here, though Hank's got a point even the total purists must bow to.

If photography is art, and an artist controls the message, the artist must do as he or she sees fit to interpret their vision and message. If cloning is one way to do that, so be it. I believe, just my belief, mind you, that ethical photographers will be honest and open about whatever manipulations they may or may not have done to an image to get the effect they want. One way to do that when quite a lot of manipulation (not just cloning) is done is to describe an image as a photo illustration, photo art, or to say in notes accompanying an online portfolio that the image has been digitally retouched, as the portfolios on this site allow.

What Hank and Steve said. Cloning is one of those subjects that can be debated ad nauseam (and often is on other sites) with plenty of pontification but no consensus. Here on NPN, we have arrived at a point where we don't make a big issue out of it as long as there is "truth in labeling" - if an image has been manipulated in terms of elements added or cloned out, we like to know about it. Beyond that, we all pretty much respect one another's views on the use of it.

If you enter "cloning" in the search field at the top of the page you will find some threads on the subject of image manipulation.

Clone everything that you feel like. If it looks bad, people here (and there) will tell you that it looks bad. Just admit that what you show is a photograph, not reality, and you should be ok.

Pete D. gettin' grumpier and grumpier

Pete, sounds like your weekend wasn't nearly long enough (or maybe too long)!

This post is copyright Jim Erhardt. Any unauthorized use or reproduction is strictly forbidden and punishable under U.S. and international law.

So there!

Interesting quandry. I think if you're proporting to represent nature (or any other subject) accurately then perhaps cloning is an issue. But what we're doing seems to me to be presenting a moment we saw and interpreted our way. We select the lenses, apertures, shutter speeds, filters, colour balance (digital or film) and cropping we use. If we make prints in a traditional darkroom we dodge and burn and manipulate the chemistry. Guess I'm not sure why cloning is any different as a tool except that for me the digital processing is a lot easier and less time consuming (on an individual image) than the wet darkroom was.

Either way what I produce is a 2 dimensional image: it certainly isn't reality.

Cloning dust spots for sure. I don't currently clone out branches and objects intentionally, nor add any objects but I can't say that if a branch were to make or break a portfolio type of image in the future I can't say that I woudln't be tempted to remove it.

It's good to revisit these issues and continue to think things over as technology advances. I'd like to offer my answer to Jeffrey's question, while hoping that Pete doesn't stroke out over it.
I tend to agree with Ed. It depends on what you are trying to communicate. I believe that documentary images must be as unaltered as possible. The public trust is more involved in needing to believe that what is represented is "the unadulterated truth." Photographs of nature can be either documentary or artistic or somewhere in between. When considering nature as the wonder it is, Ansel Adams helped decided the issure for me. As a photography intern, I learned about choosing equipment, film, exposure, filters etc to create an image. I had long admired Ansel Adams' work and was stunned when I found out what he did to his images in the darkroom, as do other well respected and reknown photographers who follow after him. Adams' chemical "manipulations" were often quite extensive. Was he right to do it? Was he wrong to do it? What I decided was that his images still blew my sox off and gave me such an appreciation of his vision and the way he interpreted nature. How many people came to a love of nature through his images would be impossible to say, but surely there are so many. I choose to bring people my vision of what I see and hope that it does good for people somehow and allows me to be creative in the process. That is art and artistic license, I guess, but I hope it ends up as a win-win deal for both photographer and viewer. If I'm "cheating" or "dishonest" or "wrong," I am in good company in mixing black ("wrong") and white ("right") into beautiful shades of grey (an interpretive compromise). IMHO. Take it easy, Pete. You have a respectable point of view, too, as far as documenting nature. But what about those gnd's and polarizers and nd's and wide angle lenses and telephoto lenses and panning, and long exposures for star trails and other special effects and other innumerable photographic techniques employed by so many creative photographers to the delight of viewers everywhere? Jeffrey, my opinion is to do what you want as long as it doesn't cause harm to anyone including yourself. As Jim says (and my dear granddad said) "honesty is the best policy." Thank you Jim, for the latitude provided on NPN to make our images and for the opportunity to disclose how we did it!
Best regards and with respect for everyone's point of view, let's do shutter on!

Jeffrey, as Hank said for some of us cloning out spots is a fact of life. Shooting large format when you scan an image you either have to go back and clone out the dust spots or use Digital ICE which is just an automated form of cloning out spots. My feeling is that unless it is a documentary image and attempting to truthfully portray exactly what was observed then it is really up to the artist. If the image content is changed from the original then I do state what change I made. It is really a personal choice.

thanks for all the comments. and i basicall agree with all of you that it is truely the artists choice. honesty is the best way to go about this it seems.. i will definately do some work on dust spots and that sort of think becasue most of the time we dont know that stuff is going to be in the pic.. any way it great to get feedback on an issue that i am confused about... thanks guys

When you think about it, using filters is also a way of eliminating information coming through the lens and preventing it from being rendered in the final image. Polarizers remove polarized light, color correction filters remove some wavelengths of light etc. You can this say that any image taken with a filter is not a true representation of the available light.
Then again, the same is true for lens coating, for the specific glass and optical design of the lens, etc.

I guess my point is that anything can be taken to the extreme and that extremism in any pursuit is generally unproductive.

Just do what you need to do to express what you want to express.

Guy

I'm pleased to be reading in this thread several comments about being openly honest. Nice to know that ethic is now growing. On the various photography enthusiast sites, threads about various facets on the ethical level of image editing regularly appear from time to time. One thing that remains the same is that most photographers and those new to computers would be rather astounded to see what a talented graphic arts pro with strong Photoshop skills can do to an image. Like the guys that regularly manipulate images to create all those fancy advertising pictures in magazines as one example. Pros can do a lot more than use the clone tool. Whole skies can be replaced. Dull gray sunsets with a few clouds can be changed to a blazing sky. All manner of objects and animals can be added...or removed. As someone using Photoshop since the 3.0 days, I can still do a lot of that stuff. Its just a manner of time and patience. Very easy to do with small images but increasingly more tedious with larger images. The point I'm making is "cloning" is just the tip of the iceberg. Things I knew would eventually rise up as a serious issue for the photography community a decade ago. That issue of what is ethical in digital processing is a lot larger than some new to the arena are imagining it to be.

As others have related, the clone tool, is actually a very useful and necessary digital tool especially for processing scanned film the larger one's images. With my 300 megabyte 4x5 transparency drum scans, although the film is carefully cleaned, I sometimes still spend an hour just clearing the usual 1/4 of the image that is sky of tiny specs and squiggles. A typical dirty 35mm slide scanned on a consumer level scanner will readily convince one of that reality. The end result simply removes dirt, dust, and scanning artifacts.

Jeffrey, to paraphrase your question, "Is it ethical during post processing to add or remove real elements that were captured on film or on digital media during the capture phase?" Well as long as a photographer honestly admits such in some way whether small or at length to their pulbic audience, there ought not be any criticism. That's creative photographic art. Something that has been with the medium in heretofore more limited ways and today is undergoing a revolution with equipment and software. ...David

Good contribution, David, and it reflects my experience and views.

The question of honesty is at the root, and it extends far beyond the clone tool. Like you, I got my start with PS very early in the cycle, and your observations about the evolution of users are right on the money. It is totally flabbergasting to see what a skilled GA can do with a photograph. They make even the best photographer/PS user look like an absolute Photoshop duffer. Naure photographers in particular simply don't utilize the program at the same level as GA's.

But then again, do we need to or should we? We're mostly after reality while the GA's reference is contemporary style and client needs. We're backtracking from the digital file to some interpretation or reaction to what we have actually seen, while they are trying to add something extra to "step things up a notch." Yup, the tools are certainly there for us to do the same things, but do we really want to, and where do we individually draw the line between the two?

I definitely clone out dust spots and/or scratches from my scans. That's a no-brainer.

Here's an interesting one though: My older 35mm scans are all on cardboard mounts. After a while I switched to a lab that used plastic mounts. The main reasons for my switch: cardboard dust, and rounded corners on the cardboard mounts. The sharp squared corners on plastic mounts were much easier to scan. I get very frustrated scanning cardboard mounts, since the rounded corners cut out the corners of all my images. I could crop the slide enough that the those corners won't be in the final scan, but I'd lose so much of the overall image. That's unacceptable to me. So, I include the full image in my scans, including those stupid rounded corners. In Photoshop, I crop as tight as I can to the edges of the mount, and then, yes, I clone out the black corners as best I can. In a final print, those corners are a pretty small amount of the overall area, no one is probably looking there, and most of it would probably be covered by a mat anyway. I'm not happy about doing it, and it's a huge waste of time, but there's no way I'm going to sacrifice the edges of my image just because of those rounded corners. I'm glad I finally wised up and moved to plastic mounts instead. I dread scanning those older slides.

So, not sure what you folks would think about this, but as far as I'm concerned, it's as much a necessity as cloning out dust, at least for my images.

Photography is an interpretive artistic endeavor. A B&W image is so far from reality that is is completely interpretive. Just the framing, aspect ratio of a scene, and what elements you chose to capture are creative decisions. The camera is a tool to get you where you want to be with your expression and your piece of art. So is film, lens selection, filters, lighting and all that you use, including the cloning tool. But, more importantly, nature is a constantly changing and random event. Just by waiting a few minutes, things will move, light will change, and your camera position will be different. So, that pesky distracting branch in your perfect image may not be there tomorrow, or wasn't yesterday. What matters only is if you want it in your image. Step around your tripod and yank the thing out of the scene. Now it has landed in yet another random position and location, one that may have been caused by wind, etc. Oh, my, you forgot to do that, and now it's in your film (or file). Just clone it out. Who cares? Maybe two steps to the left would have removed it from your scene. It's all the same thing. Just make the image you envision with whatever tools you have.

Brent Murphy: unless you don't have a capable scanner or like to project your slides, I would consider getting my chromes UNMOUNTED and sleeve them like you would negative films. A lot less waste, weight, and storage requirements. You might also consider stripping out the transparencies from your older cardboard mounts.

Michael - Thanks for the thoughts. Unfortunately, I can't do much with slides removed from their mounts. I have a Nikon Coolscan V, which requires a strip of 2-6 images. It can't scan a single frame of film by itself. I've seen a tip about taping a single image to a longer strip, if you need to scan that image, but that's a lot of trouble for a large amount of images.

Also, having single slides helps me with storage, as I can easily get rid of the images that don't work for whatever reason. If I keep strips of positives, I'll have a filing system of images I don't even want. I deal with this for my b&w negatives, and it's not a huge deal, because I don't have too many, and most are just portraits of my kids, outside of my nature photography catalog system.

The way it stands now, I'll just deal with my current system. Not the best, but it works for me. And if someone decides to buy a large print of one of those older images, I'll get a drum scan done, and the lab can deal with removing the slide from the mount and getting a full scan.