It's quite heartening people here are across (or at least
interested) the difference between documentary photography vs art!
The true art, when it comes to astrophotography, is in the deliberate, targeted framing and interpretation of the data. Mastering this is (should be) the goal of the astrophotographer.
Where astrophotography becomes astro
art, is when that interpretation impinges on reality. This is usually due to inexperience or not understanding the tools used, and rarely a true attempt to deceive (though there have been instances).
On detail and documentary photography
There are generally two classes of algorithm operations;
Restorative algorithms/operations; these tranform the data to conform to an established ground truth.
Enhancing algorithms/operations; these transform the data in a way that is discretionary.
These can further be categorised based on where they get their data from (from the dataset itself, or from some external source).
|
Restorative |
|
Enhancing |
| Intrinisc |
Deconvolution
Color
Wipe
|
HDR
Sharp
Contrast
|
Shrink |
|
DBE (sample setting-based background removal) |
Heal (hot pixels, dead pixels)
|
|
| Extrinsic |
Photometric Color Correction |
|
Heal (dust donuts)
Neural Hallucination (TopazAI, StarNet)
Synth
Operations with hand-drawn masks
|
Some operations exist somewhere in between. Purists will want to stay in the Intrinsic/Restorative category as much as possible. Most AP-ers are happy to venture outside that category (myself included) and I would argue you can still call the resulting image documentary (portraying reality) in most cases. However, when you are
enhancing your dataset with data that is
extrinsic to it, that's when things are decidedly no longer documentary - it no longer accurately reflects what was recorded (e.g. no longer portrays reality).
All that aside, a good rule of thumb is asking yourself then quesiton; "would I do this to a terrestrial negative (DNG) and still call it a photo with all its detail intact?"
If not, then; "to compensate, can I articulate to my audience what is going, so they can understand why things look the way they look?"
If the answer is "no" on both accounts, then you are likely engaging in art, rather than photography.
On coloring and documentary photography
This is part of a post I wrote a while back on CN;
bobzeq25, on 04 Aug 2021 - 01:38 AM, said:
I will note I find the concept of "documentary images" hard to grasp.
The concept is not too hard to understand. When processing an image, simply ask yourself the question "is this step I am performing helping me to convey reality better?"
It's a rather simple 'yes' or 'no' question, but to be able to answer it, it requires you to;
- understand your tools
- have a goal for your final image (and understand it!)
- communicate that goal to your audience so they can understand what they are looking at
To illustrate, take these 6 versions of an image by Courtney Smith (
from Unsplash);
-
- post-194246-0-13487200-1628041203.jpg (463.45 KiB) Viewed 5270 times
So, which ones are documentary? "The answers may surprise you"
Top left: Original image, which is pretty straightforward documentary. It depicts a nature scene in Utah. The photographer could have picked any (useful) exposure, depth of field, or color balance, without having to explain herself.
Top middle: A black and white version. Still pretty documentary. Color information is now absent, so your audience will lose some important cues (for example the great variety in chlorophyll concentrations in the vegetation).
Top right: The red and blue channel swapped. It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that this is still documentary, you just need to tell the audience what you did here. It may well be that you wanted to make it easier to see chlorophyll concentrations in the vegetation (humans and many animals are great at seeing things that stand out from green, such as a predator, and also very good at ignoring shades of green for the purpose of picking up important detail - taking the "shades-of-green" out of the equation makes it much easier to analyse what's what).
Bottom left: The original image with a
fractional differentiation filter applied to it. This filter specifically makes it easier to spot faint structures, whose presence are very real. Still documentary, but you will have to tell your audience what they are looking at and how to interpret your image.
Bottom middle: A picture that looks plausible, but does not depict reality. Artificial detail has replaced real detail. This is not documentary. Note that if I had chosen to mask out the bush and left it black (or white) this would have helped the image a lot; it makes it clear that something was there, but that it obviously detracted from the goal of the image (either for the purpose of the presentation, or for the purpose of processing - you will often see apodization masks that mask out bright star cores to process and visualize their faint exoplanets for example).
Bottom right: Manipulation of the individual color channels in a non-linear fashion. This is not documentary. Hues vary all over the place depending on brightness and convey nothing about reality. The color information has been compromised by inappropriate use of a tool, and no amount of explaining will help your viewers adjust to this.
As you can see, there is really nothing prescriptive or dogmatic about the notion of performing documentary photography, and you have loads of leeway to do as you see fit. Just don't "lie" about the reality you recorded to your audience, and - preferably - help your audience interpret your image where needed. Just doing the latter can make an image go
from ugly/bizarre at first glance, to actually brilliant.
Hopefully this arms you with some ways to separate the wheat from the chaff when perusing tutorials, videos or evaluating images by other astrophotographers!
)
). I don't pretend to be an expert but I want to provide as much information as is reasonable, it may help someone. Or not