----- Original Message ----- From: "Shel Belinkoff" Subject: Re: What do you think?
> > While I don't doubt you wrt to Grain Surgery's abilities, I tend to. And you're > right, why should anyone want to make a digital image look like a real > photograph. My point is that enough people do, otherwise Grain Surgery wouldn't > exist. It strikes me that perhaps a lot of digi users are suffering an > inferiority complex, and feel that digital should produce results like film. Photography suffered the same sorts of growing pains when in it's infancy as well. Thus, the early photographers who manipulated their negatives so as to get pictures that looked like paintings. Photography also had a hell of a time promoting itself as an artisitc medium, and in some circles, this is still an unresolved debate. However, through all this, photography gained acceptance, and has almost completely replaced oil painting as a means of artisitc representation. Digital imaging, be it direct to digital, or via scanned film is at the same point as film photography was a hundred or so years ago. Still an infant technology, and generally being practiced by people who are in a transitional state themselves, who are trying to find their own way to where they want to be. At some point, digital will, like silver before it, grow up and become an accepted medium on its own merits. Until then, like it's forbearer, people will attempt to make it emulate what it is, in essence, replacing. And don't kid yourself, digital imaging will supplant silver imaging. The signs are already out there, you would have to be deliberately blind to not see what is coming. Some digital users may be trying to make the medium emulate film, but at some point they will see that there is no reason to, will realize that the medium is different, in some ways better than film, in other ways not, and will learn how to take advantage of the improvements offered, while minimizing the compromised demanded. It's something photographers have been doing since the invention of photography. William Robb
