Digital Imaging
What is it?
My digital image processing workflow incorporates several techniques to improve image-quality; I use stacking to reduce ISO noise, HDR when the scene brightness requires it, panorama stitching and super-resolution to increase the pixel-count or accuracy of pixels in the image. These techniques are tools, not done for the sake of an "effect"."Manipulation"
The line between tweak and manipulation can be hard to define. I subscribe to the photo.net definition of "manipulation" which is to say that, if a photograph could have been made on a suitable camera at the scene with one exposure, the result is regarded as unmanipulated, with an understanding that slight tone-changes that affect the whole image are permitted (we can pretend to use a different film with those response characteristics; we can also pretend that removing dust-spots from a scan could have been achieved by cleaning it more thoroughly first). By way of contrast, if localised spatial changes have been made, the image has been manipulated.
My own stance is that I seek to record what was really there, in the most accurate yet aesthetically pleasing way possible. Because the photographs in this section arise from multiple source images, they are all technically manipulated; however, I have not tampered significantly with the subject-matter itself: the occasional very distant bird might have been included as an extension of dust-removal, but no significant features have been added or removed.
