manipulation

AI imaging for beginners
Should we be worried?

A few years ago I shot a nice picture of two of the younger members of the family jumping over small waves at the seaside. It’s a lovely picture showing the innocence and joy of youth and, though I say so myself, the photograph was perfectly timed with both children in the air at the same time. I guess that they would have been about four years old when it was taken and we have a print of it framed in the house. Fast-forward another three or four years and one of the kids in the picture asked me if it had been Photoshopped. I was taken aback and reminded him that this is what I do for a living; taking good photographs without the need to resort to fabrication. It then struck me that they have lived all of their lives in a world where pretty much every image they see is subjected to some sort of manipulation and that their trust in the accuracy of literally anything is pretty limited.

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Five levels of image manipulation

The Curve section of the EPUK website has always been a great source of information for photographers already working in editorial markets and for those who would like to do so in the future. I have written a few pieces for them over the years and my latest piece is about five different levels of image manipulation and how they should be used in newspapers and magazines.

As we celebrate the twentieth birthday of Photoshop we should take a few minutes to think about how the subject of image manipulation is regarded both inside and outside of our profession. In truth there is a sizeable majority of the population who think that every image that they see has been heavily retouched or altered.

Documentary, news and reportage photographers have a real battle to convince a sceptical world that their images tell the truth.

You might find it helps you to form your own thoughts on image manipulation by looking at these five categories of altering pictures and deciding for yourself which are appropriate for the kind of work that you do, and then using them to educate clients, friends and colleagues about how we as an industry view this very important subject.

  1. Normal darkroom practices – correction of colour, tone, contrast and saturation to reflect the way the image should look. Light dodging and burning.
  2. Darkroom interpretation – changes limited to colour, heavier dodging and burning, unnatural saturation and contrast that make the image an interpretation of reality.
  3. Minor alterations – adding or removing elements to or from the image, other than by cropping, that do not change the essential message of the image.
  4. Major alterations – adding or removing elements to or from the image that heighten or change the essential message of the image.
  5. Image montage – using elements of more than one image to make a photograph that is no longer a genuine representation of the scene.

For the purposes of news I would say that 1 is OK, and that 2 might be.

By the time you get to 3 then I would say that was unacceptable for news – unless there is a label attached or there are good public interest reasons for the manipulation (such as preserving the anonymity of vulnerable people).

The real danger here is that much of the public assume everything we do is altered. It does us no favours for this assumption to go unchallenged. The real sadness is that so many photographers supplying news images ignore the ethical implications – largely because they know no better.

Image manipulation is a serious subject and one that should be addressed by every photographer every time they sit at their screen and every time they see their work in print