The Culture of “Good Enough”

I was perusing Thom Hogan's web site a few moments ago and one of his articles discusses the concept of "pick and choose" post processing, which is heavily encouraged by almost all tools today. They all offer a plethora of presets, and many or even most of those are pretty awful on the majority of images.

And of course all these freebee post processing editors are designed with the “good enough” bar squarely in mind. Don't want to process? No problem. Click a few buttons and your results will be good enough ...

Anyway ... Thom shows a lovely image of texture shot with an LX5, specifically mentioning that he knew what post processing he would be doing as he shot the image, and because of that he knew how to set the camera to retain the detail he needed in the shadows. He then spent 5 minutes with layers and localized tweaks getting the image the way he wanted it. I.e. his process was the very opposite of point, shoot, select preset, done.

Now ... I raise this because there has been a lot of traffic lately on the DPReview forums regarding free tools. And since gear forums are generally populated by a mix of enthusiasts and inexperienced people looking for help, I thought it might be rather useful to post a counter point to what has to be thought of as the culture of "good enough" ...

Check out Thom's site at http://bythom.com

Find the article called Pick and Choose ... if it is not there, scroll to the bottom and select his archives for 2010. Note: my only beef with his site is that he does not create permalinks to all of his articles, a trivial thing to do with Blogger. This is really inconvenient when trying to send people to his site. Update: Also look for and read the article Random Wednesday Comment. Same subject, also well covered.

Here is an excerpt that closes his post:

And that brings me back to yesterday's discussion: good enough versus best tool. All those presets tend to distract people into choosing good enough. All those that try to avoid post processing at all are highly into good enough. Neither group will get everything out of their camera that's possible, in my opinion. Which makes you have to challenge what level of camera they really need (the good enough bar).

Find your bar or go for the best tool. It's your choice. I'm a best tool user, myself. Pick and choose doesn't work for me.

I feel the same way, which is why I read Thom and why I continue to post my own preference for acquiring the best tools and then spending your processing time learning them. I shake my head watching certain people who own the good stuff flit from tool to tool, wasting time and energy that could be put to good use improving technique with the better tools. It might impress the noobs, but the results don’t impress me much … with apologies to Shania Twain …

But ... as Thom points out ... everyone has a different bar in mind and there is nothing wrong with that. Whatever floats your boat. Problems only arise when people get confused about where their personal bar is set ... and when they start arguing that good enough somehow equals excellent ... it never does …

So, if you are really an enthusiast, consider embracing the fact that a final image requires an excellent capture and excellent processing. If Photoshop is too expensive, then consider Photoshop Elements. A much less expensive option but with a lot of the power of its big brother. You can learn how to use layers and you can acquire some of the more useful actions and plug-ins to make your output look that much better … get one of Scott Kelby’s books on Elements to start you off and you will be amazed at the difference in your images. But don’t forget to invest the time in learning how to get a good exposure too …