I have a friend who swears old muscle cars are a far better breed than anything made today – the whole, ‘they don’t make them like they used to’ idea. It’s crap and I think even he knows it. He’s comfortable under the hood of an old Malibu, but the engine of a new car might as well be that of a UFO. We all like what is comfortable. Mastering digital photography and the accompanying software isn’t necessarily comfortable.

But comfortable doesn’t mean better.

Image editing software can be complicated. Those who have been using it for years have grown with it and appreciate the myriad features and possibilities even if it makes for an intimidating start for some users. But let me ask you this, was the first print you ever made in a darkroom gallery quality? Did you give up after 3 or 4 hours?

If I hear one more person say they’d love to get darkroom equipment, I’ll… well probably say this to them: why? why would you possibly want to do that?

See here’s the thing. I used to be a traditional darkroom evangelist. Nothing will ever compare to a hand printed fibre based print. But then one day, I figured I should but my beliefs to the test. I took a print that I had spent four hours printing in a traditional darkroom,on fibre based paper, meticulously free of dust and carefully spotted where one or two were missed. Dozens of test prints, and cash went into the process. I took the negative I had used, scanned it, spent about ten minutes in Photoshop adjusting curves, removing dust and tweaking density and contrast in specific areas. Then ran it through a run of the mill photo lab Fuji Frontier.

The result: the fibre based print had a wonderful tonal range and very nice softness and detail in the shadows. But overall, the digitally manipulated photo was far superior, had much better presence and contrast, and side by side with the other was without a doubt, the better photo.

Don’t get me wrong, I love film. And if someone said they were going to experiment with alt processes, I’d say hell yeah, go for it. But to revert to the traditional out of some love of nostalgia, fear of learning software or some logical fallacy of ‘old is better’, I can’t accept.

So go get yourself a microwave, stop buying LPs at garage sales, join the present and take the first steps towards mastering black and white digital photography. Then once you’ve got your feet wet, start looking at the real power and control that Photoshop is capable of.