To Polarise or Not to Polarise

Why I polarised here

I seem to go through phases with my polarising filter, from using it most of the time to hardly using it at all. For the last year I’ve been going through a hardly using it phase, however it stayed on all day while we explored the delightful Bürserschlucht in the rain, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

My reason for using it was to remove the glare from the water so the amazing colour would come through – this it well accomplished. However in doing so it increased the saturation of the leaves and mosses to turbo proportions: beyond what I’m normally comfortable with.

Believe it or not I did actually reduce the saturation of greens and yellows in all the photos to try to tame them somewhat, but the use of a polariser fundamentally changes your final image, and just as it’s not possible to fake polarisation by boosting saturation and/or dehaze while editing, you can’t “unpolarise” an image in post either.

Like everything in life there are always trade-offs, and the advantages of polarisation can also be why you might not want to do it.

Why you could want to polarise

Cutting reflections will increase the saturation and reveal colours in a scene which may otherwise be obscured, particularly when its been raining. Most people think of this in relation to water, and possibly foliage, but it’s amazing how much reflection there is bouncing off rocks and dirt: polarisation can often make otherwise dull ground look rich and vibrant.

Removing reflections can also have the advantage of reducing some of the complexity in scenes where there is a lot of detail, such as in forests. Having significant reflections on every single leaf can feel overwhelming, so using a polariser can be desirable to help simplify things.

Why you might not want to polarise

The most obvious reason to avoid polarisation is because you don’t want to over-saturate the colours in your scene. While you can do a bit of desaturation while editing – as I have done here – there can be a bit of “sameness” to the level of saturation throughout the image, which tends to make the image feel less real, more fake. You can get around this somewhat by only desaturating certain colours, or even using a luminance mask to target desaturation of only lighter tones (as lighter colours usually look less saturated than darker), but the result is always going to be different than if you’d not polarised.

The less obvious reason not to polarise is that while removing reflections can reduce the complexity of a scene, this will almost certainly reduce the three-dimensionality too, as reflections are visual clues that help convey shape and depth, thus removing them tends to “flatten” the image, almost sucking the depth out of it.

And finally, removing reflections may reduce or completely eliminate contrast where its important to you to maintain it. A good example of this is a lot of forest creeks, where if you remove the reflections the water ends up much the same colour as the surrounding rocks, and you lose the impact of the stream on the composition. This wasn’t the case with my photos here, as the intense turquoise colour contrasts with the grey of the rocks, however you’ll notice that it did still make the tonalities of the water and rocks more alike than they’d otherwise be, thus reducing tonal contrast.

Is there an easy answer?

So is there some sort of easy rule of thumb to follow as to whether it’s best to polarise or not? In my mind, not really.

At the end of the day it depends on the scene, the conditions, and importantly on your vision of how you want to express the landscape before you. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, because as we’ve explored, polarisation is a series of trade-offs: gaining something, while giving up something else.

The thing is to consider those trade-offs and choose consciously what works best for you at the time. If in doubt you can always take both polarised and unpolarised shots (or even partially polarised) and decide what you like best later.

So what about my photos?

Honestly, I’m still in two minds about the polarisation in these shots, mainly because I’m in a phase where I prefer the three-dimensionality of unpolarised photos. However there was a lot of reflection this day, and the colours of the forest and stream were very vibrant, which is something I really wanted to share. Possibly partially polarised would have left me more satisfied, but since I didn’t take any like that I will never know. I do think polarised was better in these circumstances for me than unpolarised.

In the end, when I find myself unsure about images I’ve taken, I find it’s good to let go of thinking about them, let them settle for a time, then revisit them at a later date and see how I feel then. Sometimes I find I really like them; sometimes I find I want to re-edit them; and sometimes I find I wished I’d taken the images differently, in which case I file that information away for future photo adventures and just try to enjoy the images I did take for what they are.