Many arguments come up in photographic circles about "how much is too much" when it comes to post processing photos of people. Everyone has their own opinion, so I'm going to share mine, and back it up with why I believe what I do.

But let's start at the beginning. When we talk about post processing, it's really been around since the dawn of photography. As soon as people realised they could use certain chemicals etc to treat photos (or sections of photos) they have been playing around with shots to get a desired look. And that's fair enough, we all do it, we want our shots to look good and we want to be respected for our work so we will go that extra mile to obtain a certain look that sets the shot apart from ordinary "happy snaps" or whatever.

But where does it cross the line?

I personally hate loading up a photo from a thumbnail where I think "that looks nice, good lighting, composition, etc" and upon viewing the full image I see these over-the-top whites of the eyes (and teeth, but the eyes bug me more), plastic looking skin, deep etching that makes you cringe (with unrealistic shadows or bad blurry cutouts) and/or unrealistic layer masking to bring the subject "out" from the background (think, weird shaped vignettes on steroids). And don't get me started on all this oversaturated nonsense (I'd love to run a photoshop gamut check on a lot of photos in this place, just to see how they went). It's like people just go mad with plugins, as though there's no such thing as "too far".

So now that I've stated *what* I hate, *why* exactly do I hate these things?

Mainly because, as my title suggests, we get caught up in this whole "perception vs reality" thing. Why do so many people get pissed off when a model in a magazine has a head bigger than her pelvis? It's because I think, for the most part, people in general are getting annoyed with this overprocessing in the media, and I quite frankly don't want to go down that path myself. And who would want to? God has created so many amazing people, and for some reason we feel the need to make them look plastic, as though they've come off a production line? The best photographers are ones that can capture "what is there" and make it look like the stuff of fantasy with a minimum of tweaks (or, none at all!). They can bring out the beauty of a subject (or subjects) without having to "plasticify" (is that a word? it is now!) them. My own personal challenge in my photography is to be able to do that, and while I am a long way off, I feel it helps to keep me grounded in what is important, not just in one's art but in one's life.

As well as this, I just get annoyed with seeing shots that would look so much better if they were more natural, instead of some kind of hyped up HDR oversaturated plastic mess.

But anyway, that's enough ranting for now. I need to eat. Happy to hear people's thoughts on the matter.

Matt