Acceptable uses of Photoshop in the Guardian and Grazia
A certain amount of scepticism is a healthy thing in journalists and readers alike. Going through the thousands of photographs that the Guardian picture desk receives each day, we try to keep a critical eye on anything that could be the result of digital retouching software like Photoshop. We are kept on our toes by eagle-eyed readers, always alive to the possibility of artifice.
The most common complaint is the "flipping" of a photograph. This often happens accidentally when using images from picture libraries that have been scanned from negatives or transparencies. But there is also an old tradition in newspaper design for a picture, especially of a person, to face into the page or story that it illustrates, and subeditors have a tendency to want to "flip" to achieve this. But it is against our guidelines.
Our rule about the use of Photoshop and other picture-manipulating software is that cropping and toning – basically anything that might have been done in a darkroom – is OK, but the moving of pixels or "cutting and pasting" is forbidden. We have to trust our photographers and the agencies we deal with not to indulge in anything that might go against our guidelines, but usually it's difficult to spot. I suspect the odd door handle, light switch and extraneous elbow may have been retouched by perfectionist photographers, and most of the time this probably doesn't matter because the pictures are being used in a non-news context – a portrait in the arts pages, for example.
The context is all-important, especially in this internet-dominated world. The web is awash with spoof pictures, and on guardian.co.uk we publish galleries of football montages sent in by readers. Are we encouraging serious image manipulation or merely reflecting the real world, where this sort of activity is commonplace and often as innocent as a child's colouring-in book? Perhaps what we are actually doing is raising awareness of picture manipulation.
Worrying about image alteration used to be the preserve of media students. Now it seems everyone is up for smoking out a conspiracy. Take the controversy over a recent photo of President Assad of Syria. The caption supplied by the Syrian state news agency said it showed the president swearing in the new governor of Hama. OK, but Assad seems to be strangely floating above the carpet, and are the shadows all in the right place?
So, were the two men in the same room at all? No one could say for sure. But an article about the picture posted on guardian.co.uk attracted 117 comments and provoked many conversations in this office. It seemed to me that perhaps this particular image didn't really matter that much as it was supplied by the Syrian state, which devalued it news-wise anyway. Who would assume the veracity of an image released by any totalitarian regime, after all we know about Stalin and his photographic purges?
Another image manipulation to attract outrage was the picture of the Duchess of Cambridge on the cover of Grazia magazine. William's arm was removed and replaced by a clone of Kate's right arm, and she appeared to have been slimmed down. However, the image was pure illustration, and magazines routinely remove fat, spots, wrinkles and other blemishes from their cover models. It's all about context again – surely we all know that everything that glisters on a glossy front cover isn't necessarily gold?
If Grazia had done the same to a picture as part of their reportage of the wedding it would have been much more serious and misleading. That is why the Guardian's rules on manipulation are so firm when applied to news photographs. We don't want to mislead; we want to be a trusted source of news imagery. But we live in a world where we are bombarded with fabricated pictures, from adverts to artworks. Increasingly as picture editors we are relying on trust, but also on a more sophisticated understanding of the use of imagery from our readers.
And while Russia does not retouch history any more by removing politicians from news photographs, Vladimir Putin, former president and current prime minister, has a long track record of staging photo opportunities that verge on the ridiculous; when we publish the results of these, one hopes the reader will view them with a pinch of Siberian salt.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/04/picture-manipulation-news-imagery-photoshop
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