I spend considerable time viewing photographs online, whether it's for pleasure, or researching for this site. One thing I am finding is that many of the images you see have noticeably over-saturated colours. With modern digital editing being as easy as adjusting some sliders, I think we have inadvertently trained our eye to desire photographs to be completely over the top and unrealistic as far as colour goes.

What is even more distressing to me is the fact that this type of processing seems to be more and more the norm these days. We see it on websites, photo sharing apps, magazines, wherever you look. Do you remember the TV show, CSI Miami? Remember all those wide, sweeping shots of Miami they used to show? All over-saturated to the max! Not at all what you see if you go there.

In my opinion, photography is the act of capturing an event or a scene and preserving it. If we are preserving a scene we witnessed, we would want to preserve it in it's pure form, or in other words, the way your eye saw it. If we are going to over-saturate it and create a falseness that was never there, we haven't done our job as photographers. So many of the photographs we see these days are manipulated and saturated far past the point of even looking real, they look almost cartoon-like.

The photograph below was made in a nice little town in Quebec along the St Lawrence River depicting sunset in the Laurention Mountains. There is already lots of nice colour there and there were no adjustments made that would artificially increase anything. I did two main adjustments, the first was to soften the sky to make the clouds look a bit less harsh. The other thing I did was to dodge up the foreground to balance the dynamic range better. The foreground was dark because of metering on the bright sunset across the river, but in person, it was more as you see it here. This is what the real event looked like and it looks much better than if I had taken liberties and messed with saturation.