I really don't like this

NB: this post was written well before the Covid-19 outbreak

A necessary “evil” of shooting digital images, and in particular raw ones, is post processing.  It really is an integral part of digital photography.

There are any number of software packages and options available for tweaking your images.  My ones of choice are Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop, along with a program called Capture One which is really good for processing the raw files from my Fujifilm X-T3 camera.

Anyway, the skill in post processing is knowing when enough is enough and consequently when to stop.

Personally, I don’t do too much to my raw images as I prefer to get the image as good as I can “in camera”.

100% my photo, my foreground and my sky; hell, I'm even in it!

One trick available (albeit one that I do not use myself) is the ability to swap out the sky in your image for a more interesting one.  You can cut a sky from one image and paste it onto another, mess about with it for a bit and you have a totally different image to the one you shot.  To do this properly though requires a great deal of skill and patience.  I'd rather use that skill and patience to wait for the right conditions.

But a new piece of software has now been introduced by a company called Luminar.  It makes the whole process of swapping out a sky the work of a second or so.  A push of a button transforms your image - swapping out the sky and even manipulating the lighting conditions on the rest of your image to match.  They even provide a whole library of skies to choose from.

This, for me anyway, is taking it too far.  I mean, using a sky you didn’t even photograph yourself and swapping out for one you did with absolutely zero skill required is not photography.

It might look natural and really skilfully done, but... 

IT'S NOT YOUR PHOTOGRAPH ANY MORE.