The Case for Image Manipulation

If you’ve ever watched any cooking/food show featuring Alton Brown (and honestly Good Eats was one the best television productions ever created regardless of topic or genre) then you know how much he scorns “single-use kitchen gadgets”. With the increased usage of focus stacking and photo editing for our model photos I’d make the case that, when it comes to image manipulation, you should invest your hobby dollars in a tool that can do more than one thing.

Helicon Focus and Combine Z do excellent jobs at focus stacking, but that’s all they do. If you’re semi serious about learning and developing skills in this area you’re better off investing in a tool that can crop, clone, mask, distort, and blur… as well as focus stack. I’ve come to prefer Adobe Photoshop for my needs, but that’s based on the fact that I use it on a regular basis. Affinity, GIMP, and a host of others are also available at a variety of price points, learning curves, and feature sets. But the key is that they are not single-use tools.

With today’s technology I’d argue that there’s no reason you shouldn’t be producing more life-like pictures, especially as such technology becomes more and more affordable and accessible. Throw in the ability to self-publish such content through a variety of mediums and you’ve got everything you need to convince the masses that your model world is as close to reality as possible.

Not that you asked, but the above image was not shot in the dark. Everything visible was digitally manipulated.