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Comment by lonelyasacloud | Hacker News Reader

> The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people.

Is nothing new.

When film was mass market almost no one developed their own photos (particularly colo(u)r). Instead almost all printing went through bulk labs who optimised for what people wanting to show to their family and friends.

What is different now is if someone cares about post processing to try and present their particular version of reality they can do it easily without the cost and inconvenience of having to setup and run a darkroom.

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Personally coming from the film era, I don't think it's as clear cut as this.

Many of the post-processing an informed person does on a digital photo is an emulation of a process rooted in a darkroom, yes.

On the other hand, some of the things cameras automatically does, e.g.: Skin color homogenization, selective object sharpening, body "aesthetic" enhancements, hallucinating the text which the lens can't resolve, etc. are not darkroom born methods, and they alter reality to the point of manipulation.

In film days, what we had as a run of the mill photographer was the selection of the film, and asking the lab "can you increase the saturation a bit, if possible". Even if you had your darkroom at home, you won't be able to selectively modify body proportions while keeping the details around untouched with the help of advanced image modification algorithms.

Which is one reason why I often still shoot with an actual camera and sometimes even with film. I have a lifetime of experience with common film emulsions and a couple of decades of shooting with digital sensors with limited post processing.

When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.

It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.

I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.

If a professional had access to darkroom facilities pretty much everything could be done in there right down to removing people and background objects (see for instance https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1...).

It's just far easier for anyone to do now.

I know. You can remove people, use selective exposure with dodge and burn, etc.

But you can't change a person's proportions and skin tones so precisely unless you're printing small and have time, equipment and talent to paint the positive (negative would be nigh impossible) in a believable manner to do so.

On the otter hand, you can enable slimming filter on your phone or camera, click and you go.

Oh, also, some of the Soviet photo manipulation is done with stolen and translated French software, in 1987 [0].

[0]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/04/1821236/soviet-imag...

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