In my last article about Photoshop I spoke about people who edit there photographs so much and get thousands of favourites for doing so, great but it seems you have to use Photoshop these days to get any popularity what so ever, in fact if you have a great photo and you say you didn’t Photoshop it, people say your lying.

Surely if you put loads of textures over your image that should be photo manipulation. What does a texture add to a photo? Why do people put them on, other to make the image look pretty? And there is the problem, because it seems these days if your image doesn’t have one, it’s not as pleasing.
Another couple of fashionable things these days and things I see on nearly all the photos I see in the popular sections are:

Vignette, it seems everyone does this to a picture, sometimes its ads to the photo as it draws your eye to the subject, but I’ve seen it on nearly every photo I’ve seen, I’ve also seen it on every photo in peoples galleries. Some people have it as there kind of trade mark which is ok, but it seems it’s a huge trend.
In fact the whole retro thing is a huge trend at the moment, and mostly cross-processing is all the rage.
I can’t tell you how many retro, cross-processing tutorials, actions ect there are on DA, and everyone is doing it.
And it annoys me because in the popular section you will be hard pushed to see a photo that isn’t done in this style. And if you upload a photo that hasn’t got this effect on it, you get comments like, this is abit dull, could be more contrast, its too dark ect ect.
Again is this what we are all destined for, people following each other? To get favs and attention are we going to have to do what everyone else does?
Because if we don’t, people don’t like it, I’ve seen people do different and people seem to be scared of this.

Also the people who are popular, and I mean really popular have there own style, which is great, but everyone who goes to there site feels they have to do whatever that artist did to get popular, thus everyone copies everyone else’s style, and thus everything on DA looks the same.

I myself have got caught up with this craze, I found I really liked the effect and started doing it to a lot of my photos.
Then one day I put the same effect on a photo I did for my college work, I hadn’t really thought about it, I just did it, and I didn’t have a reason why I did it, and when I showed it to my tutor, he asked me what the hell I had done to the photo. He told me the blacks looked washed out and it made the photo look bad. And that’s when I realized I had ruined my photo because my eye was trained to prefer this look. Kind of like when you prefer smash to real mash potato.

The point I’m trying to make is, lets not all be sheep and constantly do the same thing, I can’t be the only person who finds this boring, seeing thousands of photographs the same?
Lets not all rely on textures and effects to make our photos look better.
Let’s love photography for what it is and know the difference between photography and photo manipulation.