Photoshop Is Sapping the Spectacular Out of Photography
This is my most ‘liked’ photo on 500px. I knew it would be a hit the moment I uploaded it. There’s only one problem: it’s not really mine. At least, not all of it is.
The picture of the pier itself is mine, taken on Sunday, as I went down to Brighton beach in search of the starlings swarming over the pier. I was a day too late.
I took a perfectly nice photo, which I converted to black and white and uploaded to 500px on Sunday evening and it was fairly well received. Not a blow-the-doors-off viral smash, but 20 or so likes, enough to make it ‘Popular’ in the site’s gradings.
However, as you can see the sky was pretty lifeless. That’s not really my fault — the sky’s the sky, I don’t have meteorological powers. I did what I could with the conditions at hand, as I teach people to do on my photography courses.
But Adobe Photoshop 2021 doesn’t want me to settle for dreary skies. One of the headline features of this year’s refresh was Sky Replacement, a new guided edit that gives you a selection of preset skies and lets you plonk them on your image.
