The public assumption is that Photoshop equals airbrushing. To Photoshop is to retouch. Photoshop became famous for the Liquify effect. Tightening Britney’s / Courtney’s / Famous Celebrity Y’s hips and thinning her thighs. It’s the stuff of a behind the scenes beauty feature on E! Entertainment and it’s what gave Photoshop a bad rep.

But Photoshop doesn’t necessarily make for better images. It just makes them different. This is not always a good thing. There are many photographers who photoshop badly. Photoshop can be a an axe, hacking away the sumptuous subtlety of an image. Over-editing can make photographs surreal and jarring. Too punchy, too colorful, too contrasted, too bright, over-sharp. Photoshop can show a photographer trying too hard to fix an image that wasn’t very interesting in the first place. There are also some photographers who claim superior skills because they don’t use photoshop at all. But photoshop is such an integral part of the process of modern photography, to avoid it completely is like a writer trying to avoid spellcheck.

An essential questions remains: If everybody has access to the same photo-manipulation tools, the same scripted effects, the same youTube photoshop tutorials, etc, what makes one photographer better than another? It’s obviously not just the way they edit an image, but the whole way they handle an idea. The skill is still in their eye, their particular taste, their way of managing a visual process. It’s up to the photographer as director, shaper, storyteller to draw on visual cues and triggers, to balance and compose scenes intuitively, to use a range of equipment and lenses, to draw on rich narratives by casting the right people and choosing the right locations to create the emotion and power behind an image. Photography is a process, like design, engineering, sewing. Photoshop can help or hinder that process. It’s a tool not a solution.