Hiroshige Invented Colour Grading

Sort of… Went to a Hiroshige exhibition at the British Museum today and was mildly amused to see that the Japanese block printers would produce various versions of the same print with different inks to evoke different times of day or appeal to different customers.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hiroshige-artist-open-road

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This is a good example to send to those people that argue about the purity of your photography if you apply radical color changes :smiley:

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Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking when I saw it. Those accusations of cheating when you’re not just using whatever automatic adjustments your camera/phone has done for the unwitting you, “straight out of camera”.

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Hi,
I’m regularly confronted with this type of discourse, where I hear talk of a “tweaked” photo, as soon as you use software to develop a RAW file correctly.

The vast majority of amateur photographers I’ve encountered have a very poor visual and technical culture. The photo clubs, as I know here in France, I’ve been involved with have almost always focused on the performance of the equipment, from the camera to the computer. The history of the visual arts is ignored, and the mythology of the reporter of reality still pervades people’s minds today.

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Whenever “pure” photography comes up, your job, all of our jobs, is to yell “camera obscura??”

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Same with my wife. I’m forbidden to edit pictures. But of course one of her preferred photo shows her with two of her friends, where some un-confessed light touch-up removed 5 years to everybody.

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