... as contrasted with this publisher's clear contempt for that process.
If you will take the time to read their instructions, Lark Books does not express an "clear contempt" for digital editting. In fact, they ask submitters to suggest to them what edits to make. Clearly, they will be using digital editting. But they want to do that themselves so that they can control it and can know that the knife has not been photoshop-embelished. I think that that's a laudable goal.
By the way, I don't think that Dr. Darom has "photoshop-embelished" the knives in his books either. I have seen several of the knives in his book in person and they are as beautiful in person as they are in the pictures
I often see in for-sale posts or on e-bay and the like the phrase, "The picture doesn't do it justice." In that case, take another picture!
Consider, for example, the three-dimensional nature of a hollow-ground blade. it doesn't "read" well in a flat picture. The depth of a hollow grind is actually not that great. If you're using 1/4" stock (a very chunky blade indeed), the most you can get is 1/8" of depth. But most knives use stock that is closer to 1/8", so the maximum depth of the hollow grind is 1/16". If the camera is twelve inches from the knife when the picture is taken, then you're trying to show a depth variation of 1/192th of the total depth of the picture. It's even worse on a hollow-ground blade because that depth step doesn't happen sharply; it's not like photographing a staircase where there are sharp edges that read well. The uniform color of the blade further hides the depth of the grind. And the finishes we often use, brushed or bead-blasted are the worst for this, further hide the depth.
You've probably experienced this yourself, seeing a knife on a table and then picking it up and realizing that it's hollow-ground. You didn't see that in the flat image. As you pick a knife up, as you just move your eyes in your eye sockets, you're changing the angle you look at the knife from. The human brain has an amazing ability to take hundreds of images of an object seen from hundreds of angles achieved by moving the object, moving your eyes, moving your head, and moving your body, and combining them into one three-dimensional representation of the object in your head. Keep in mind, also, that you have two eyes and see in stereo. T
One of the best examples of this as Coop pointed out, and one of the most vexing materials to photograph, is mother of pearl (all shell materials). When we handle it, without thinking, we move it back and forth in the light and we say, "Wow! What a great piece of pearl. It's got reds and greens and blues and pinks!" And then we take the picture and it just looks white or maybe you can see a little pink or blue. Has Kodak deliberately formulated the film or Nikon deliberately rigged the software to loose the color in MOP? No. The piece does have all of those colors in, but not all at once from any one angle. Our amazing brain puts a hundred images from a hundred angles together and forms the mental model of the piece with all those colors in it. But the camera can only capture one angle at a time. And the angle that optimizes the presentation of the rest of the knife is always the angle from which the MOP is lifeless.
To capture all of the hundreds of pictures that your brain uses to form its 3D model in a single flat picture is a challenge that photographers have fought with since the invention of photography. The ability to overcome the limitations of the media and imbue the picture with a sense of the actual object, to get the picture to "do the object justice," is what separates a photographer from a guy with a camera.
My solution, very often, is not to try at all but to, instead, offer multiple pictures of the same knife.
