Is Using Photoshop Cheating Or Art?

Now that I am retired, I find myself with lots of free time to pursue things that I never had time for before – like trying to learn how to use Photoshop.  I am far from being an expert, but I have been learning from videos, tutorials, and blogs.

I like to play around with Photoshop, and also Photoscape (FREE), and take some of what I consider my better photos, and then see what I can do with them using filters or action scripts.

boats

I have learned to blend, mask, layer, and a few other tricks and also like to see what the color photos look like if converted to black and white.  Some, I feel, with the correct filter, would make nice paintings.  Anyhow, you will see later on and then can opine.

As my friend, Tom at Isaan-Live can attest, it is very difficult to get a good photo of a Thai temple since most have wires from dangling light bulbs or speakers strung about that all but ruin what could have been a nice photo.

One also has to deal with the weather and the sun, the never ending construction complete with scaffolding, and other people that get in your way since now everyone has a camera in their cell phone.

So, is it wrong to take a photo with a very nice blue sky and blend it into a different photo that has a very cloudy background?

I didn’t notice the bird that got enlarged until after I was done.

What about taking a color photo and making it black and white?  This is one of my favorite shots of an older monk in a very small temple in Chiang Khan.  My wife’s uncle took me there and we had to ask this monk for permission to view a 1,000 year old Buddha image (that was under lock and key in basically a prison cell).  The monk was so at ease while talking to Uncle Pong and when I asked if it was OK to take some photos, he smiled and obliged.

I kind of like the part color and part black and white the best, but the black and white conversion I think makes the pic look much older than from 2010.

The boat picture up top, was actually two pictures from a PDF ebook that I converted to HTML and then stitched together to make one photo.  I then played around a bit with two filters – oil painting and watercolor painting.

The next shot is of some water buffalo outside my front gate and filtered as watercolor with a different texture.

The carved wooden dragon from a nearby temple was first done photoshopped to make it black and white – but I decided to add a little color.

Another of my favorite shots is the sunrise over the Mekong River.

So, what do you think?  Cheating or art?