these are all great pictures, however, i am not a photographer , or graphic designer but in my opinion, “the light house”, the”behind the bottle”, and possible “droplets”, but it also could be a realy realy good/high def camera/ photographer..i think my favorite one is the “fish-eyes” its a really different and creative picture!

On second thought, Lighthouse could easily be a time-lapse picture. I guess I’ll call “real” on that one too.

this is why photography will always have a love/hate relationship with photoshop. it’s a wonderful tool to fix images, but sometimes, people just capture great shots. no photoshop required. just an amazing shot. and these are. i love them.

“The beach”, the “Sky in my Hands” and the “Underwater” seem to me like photoshopped. If they aren’t, hats off to the photographers.. they have done a brilliant job.

Really amazing pictures. I loved the “follow your shadow”. Good work!

Very nice photo

Very nice pictures, thanks ^__^

For me, btw, the “photoshopped or not” kind of arguing is completely irrelevant.
If a picture is better with a little color boost or manipulations, so what?
It’s the same as the “pure oldschool photographers” claiming they never resize or crop their pictures, that it as to be shot perfect… Nonsense

Penguin Lips are photoshoped because depth of field is to big, someone used gaussian blur to get such effect

I think these are awesome photos. I love “fish eyes” best – its such a clever idea. As for photoshopping – I think if they say they haven’t then they are probebly telling the truth – Henri Cartier Bresson didn’t have photoshop and he took some amazingly clever photos. How can you tell anyway?

I don’t know if they are, but regardless, they are excellent shots which took a lot of talent on the photographers’ part. And if they are photoshopped, they don’t appear overly so. Most photographers do a little photoshopping. I am a purist, mostly, but even I will sometimes lighten up a photo, brighten the color a little, or crop. I hate when a photo is majorly changed, but these photos seem within the rules!

krissy knox

This is a really nice collection of images, and it serves as a reminder of the true skill and art of photography, yes most of these could have been photoshoped, but for me these pictures have an integrity that could never have been inserted with the clone tool. Its very easy to take short cuts when you have photoshop at your finger tips but i think more designers photographers and artist should try going back to there roots and apply some design process which involves either getting out in to the world or getting there hands dirty, you never know where it could take you.

Whoa!!!

That’s way awesome. I am going to have to bookmark this. I can’t really decide on a favorite, they are all really good!

Nate

Amazing. Just amazing. How did they catch these?

As a photographer who doesn’t (yet!) know much about photoshop, I would say that most of these photos could be created without any photoshop assistance. I’m not 100% convinced by the lighthouse because, as someone else commented, the beams are right for a lighthouse, but I’m willing to be proved wrong! And the other one I’m not convinced by is Behind the Bottle. How lucky would you need to be to get the timing so perfect?! Just seems too good to be true. But generally, these are amazing pictures and I am quite in awe!

The lighthouse one could easily be a well timed multiple-exposure image. I’d guess it was taken with a film camera.

The photos are amazaing and dunno if they r photoshopd are nt but whoever took them did a grt job:)

I have seen #8 before on deviant art. The photographer said that he was below the school of fish and when he released bubbles the fish scattered as they rose through the fish. Not sure if thats true, but thats what I read.

“not photoshoped” is a bit sad use of words since most of these pictures have been post-processed in photoshop. There are even tutorials, like the one from PORG:
http://p0rg.deviantart.com/art/Landscape-Sky-Color-Tutorial-82618237
what you ment, was photo-retouched which is often used synonym to shopped.

No photoshop. However, many of these would once have been called trick photography, or in camera effects. The lighthouse is probably a filter with some kind of grid or polarising thing. The underwater fish are real. There are a few very fast motion shots. The beach is just about juxtaposition and a drop that looks like water. The clouds could be multiple exposures.. There is now an aesthetic choice in using this kind of craft as opposed to photoshop, akin to doing real or CGI stunts. Both work, but there is something speciallly cool about managing optics, physics and cameras.

@Brian May – Macro lenses tend to have incredibly shallow depths of field. At a wide open aperture with a macro lens, something that’s “about the same distance” would actually be more out of focus than you may realize.

Aw come on, I’m sure that each one of those photos has gone through a bit of Photoshopping, even if it was just to adjust the levels, or to balance the colors, a common requisite for digital photos. Some have even been turned around a bit perhaps (like a Rotate Canvas CCW 90 degrees for the “Follow your shadow” pic?).

But all said and done, nothing very extensive or life-changing has been attempted with these photos. So you might say, in a way, that they have not been photoshopped in any extensive way so as to produce something that was not there in the first place.

I love the fish eyes, that just seems like a “hey put those back in that same spot again” type of shot. Very spur of the moment!

I love all the pictures, but the light house cant be claimed as not photoshopped. Fortunately, I do come from mariners family. Lighthouses’ beams have (majority of cases) two distinctive beams, solid and very directional. That’s the individual signature of each one of them, the frequency of the alternation between the beams. Beams can’t be as diffused because the intention is precisely two reach farther ahead to avoid collisions. Otherwise, a filter could have been used, but still the rays are way too consistent. All these said, very nice picture anyway! Remember, photographers are artists thus, creators. The practice with Photoshop is no more than the ones in dark rooms. Difference, is easier and less costly Photoshop way.

Why do people immediately guess that photography is photoshopped? I’d guess these are all real photos, I can think of ways they could all be done. Only ones I’m not too certain about is #6 Water droplets because I can’t see exactly what the subject is, and #4 may be HDR to achieve the nice gradient in the sky as well as the rest of the photo.

I don’t know why you’d even think some of these are photoshopped, they clearly aren’t (eg. fish eyes). It’d also be nice to credit the authors, for starters fish eyes is by gnato ( http://gnato.deviantart.com/ ).

Also, if you want to see some better examples of photos that aren’t photoshopped, search google for it, there’s this asian (sorry for the generalisation, I think he was korean but it may have been chinese, I cannot remember) photography that does amazing trick photography that seems to be totally unexplainable.

Is this serious? Of course the bulk of these images are photoshopped (or at least, if they didn’t use photoshop they used some other image editing tool). The tomato one probably osn’t, but it is just a photo of a tomato taken close up – so what!

oh and great post! wonderful images.

no photoshop…. hmmmmm!

I thought I could see 7 that have been “photoshopped” … but def no expert here! However..brilliant photo’s each and every one of them! Thanks for sharing!

Those are awesome shots indeed! =)

Well, some of these have been enhanced in some way…remember people were taking fantastic images far better than these before Photoshop arrived! Photography is about capturing and using light…not about Photoshop. The images that do look a little processed could be down to filters on lenses, such as starburst or grads.
It takes a lot to get a good shot…using a computer is part of the process, but it doesn’t always mean you need to use it to manipulate. I would suggest that if these were digital then they would have needed sharpening…so in some respects Photoshop does need to be used.
It is interesting when you say “Every single image is REAL”…now there is a matter of debate, you could say that no photograph is real, as the camera manipulates, or ‘influences’ it’s own outcome in some sense…even reportage.
Personally I would say 12, 13, 19 [looks very digital], and 20 have enhanced colour, tone, contrast and/or saturation etc, 20 looks like somekind of vignette has been applied for depth, and 16 has a very dodgy soft-focus blur on it. But who knows.
Great questions and answers though…I like this page.