Fuschia Throne, photo by Harold Davis.

I like the way this image came out, particularly the saturation of the colors.

There’s something about the mysterious that turns me on, and I don’t always believe in sharing how an image was made. Particularly in the context of todays hybrid imagery: one part digital photography and one part image manipulation using Photoshop.

There are various schools of thought about image manipulation. Some folk believe that only an image that has essentially not been manipulated in post-production process counts as a “true” photograph.

I come from a different camp. I care what an image ends up looking like, and I don’t believe in creating artificial divisions about the means to the end.

The truth is that all imagery is about manipulation of the physical world into an articial construct of pixels (in other words, your camera is manipulating). To pretend otherwise is to create an artifically segregated society of digital images, separating the “have-not” manipulated from those that have. Or the straight photos from those that have been gayly manipulated!

For the record, this image is fairly straight.

I used the wonderful feature in Photoshop CS2 that lets you use the RAW conversion settings from a previous conversion (since the other photos in my Crystal World set use essentially the same settings). I adjusted levels slightly, sharpened, and cleaned up blemishes, all part of the standard post processing of a digital image.

In addition, I sharpened the center of the fuschia a bit by selected the central area with the Lasso Tool and applying CS2’s Smart Sharpen filter with the radius set quite high to the selected area.