Print Vs Online

Different medium, different aesthetics, different lifetimes

Two different treatments of the same image. On the left we have a tiny adjustment that adds a tremendous amount of punch, it looks sharper, with more “clarity”, especially in those bold white letters that are in focus. The version on the right looks blah using the default Adobe Color profile. The version on the left is a slightly different contrast curve, no “clarity” slider needed.

What are we being sold today when it comes to photographic gear? I’m including all things from cameras to lenses to post-processing software. In a nutshell, I propose we are being sold a bevy of gear that is singularly focused on all things being louder, faster, and how all this can transform photographs into something completely different from what they were when we made them.

This is clearly apparent in various Adobe marketing emails I received over the last week. Just today, I was greeted with an email from Adobe that promises ”BOOST CLARITY IN SECONDS”. It continues with showing a tiny, blurry, pixelated image magically transformed into one that’s sharp. A few days before that was a different Adobe advert that showed a very loud, colorful picture of a woman dressed in an outrageous wardrobe. It was perfectly fine but was completely transformed in terms of background, pose, and now holding an object that didn’t exist before. All of this was ostensibly done via typing words into AI.