Re: OT: Photoshop CS4 upgrade overpriced
On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, Dan Burkholder wrote: Here's another tack: For years I would diffuse the image under the enlarger lens to spread the blacks. Since we "write with light," that diffusion of blacks is an effect we can't get in camera at the time of exposure. Would you ridicule that sort of "post processing" in the darkroom? Would bleaching the highlights in a print be another attempt at shining up the fecal matter?As a fan of the popular photo press (from maybe the 100 years before the year 2000 when there used to BE a popular photo press), I can attest that every era, and no doubt every "expert" has his (usually "his") do's and don'ts. In part maybe because the possibilities are so vast that the "unguided" photographer could be paralized without boundaries (like the donkey with 1000 bales of hay). In fact I summarized what they called "violating the medium" through photo history (in an early P-F). In brief, until "breaking the rules" got normalized in the 1970s or so, the tendency post-"pictorialism" was to say anything that didn't heighten realism was verboten. I haven't tried to follow the current argument (though maybe anything that "enhances" digital can be fecally suspect ?). HOWEVER, that's not why I'm writing (just a form of throat clearing), which is to call attention to the following. Dan wrote: ...today I'm printing platinum on vellum; later today the prints will get varnished and backed with gold leaf.And if he thinks he's going to escape from this city without describing, detailing, explaining, etc. which *varnish*, and about that *goldleaf* !!! --- he can just think again.... best, Judy
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