Years ago, photo editing was a laborious and tedious process. If you wanted to change more than the bare basics, such as lighting or darkening a photo, you could figure on many hours of work ahead of you.
If you wanted to remove an element from a photo, that would take days. You would have to replace that object or feature with other items from the photo and try to make it blend. Say you had a picture of a group of people and you wanted to remove one of them from the group. That seems simple now but it used to take days.
Now, computer programs like Photoshop make it quick and easy to edit photographs. This is a huge difference in the world of photo editing. Now it is easy to play with lighting and exposure.
It's also now much easier to change the picture entirely. This can be very unfortunate. You can now take an image and, without a lot of difficulty, take out elements or add elements that were not there when the photo was taken.
That's not journalism. Photojournalists, like all journalists, are not supposed to make things up. The goal of journalism is to report on reality. It's one thing to edit a picture because the color cast is off. It is another thing to change the color of the sky, from a sunny day at noon to a stormy one or to a brilliant sunset.
Other small changes are tantamount to telling lies to the viewer. For instance, if you add smoke to a scene, or add more people to make a crowd seem larger, this isn't making it more dramatic or enhancing its representativeness. You are fictionalizing the image and it is inappropriate.
Where is the line between simply making the photo better, and making up a photo that is not the picture that was taken? If you add or subtract elements that change the meaning of the picture, you have gone too far. Adding or removing information is a no-no. That includes cutting out any information for ostensibly reasonable causes like "it was blurry." That isn't the point. If you change the content, you have gone too far.
When you are editing photos, you should keep these standards in mind. How closely you need to adhere to them depends on your role. A picture that is "art" can be stylized, because the photographer is an artist. The artist has full artistic license. But a journalist is a journalist, and has journalistic standards, even when their medium is photography.
If you wanted to remove an element from a photo, that would take days. You would have to replace that object or feature with other items from the photo and try to make it blend. Say you had a picture of a group of people and you wanted to remove one of them from the group. That seems simple now but it used to take days.
Now, computer programs like Photoshop make it quick and easy to edit photographs. This is a huge difference in the world of photo editing. Now it is easy to play with lighting and exposure.
It's also now much easier to change the picture entirely. This can be very unfortunate. You can now take an image and, without a lot of difficulty, take out elements or add elements that were not there when the photo was taken.
That's not journalism. Photojournalists, like all journalists, are not supposed to make things up. The goal of journalism is to report on reality. It's one thing to edit a picture because the color cast is off. It is another thing to change the color of the sky, from a sunny day at noon to a stormy one or to a brilliant sunset.
Other small changes are tantamount to telling lies to the viewer. For instance, if you add smoke to a scene, or add more people to make a crowd seem larger, this isn't making it more dramatic or enhancing its representativeness. You are fictionalizing the image and it is inappropriate.
Where is the line between simply making the photo better, and making up a photo that is not the picture that was taken? If you add or subtract elements that change the meaning of the picture, you have gone too far. Adding or removing information is a no-no. That includes cutting out any information for ostensibly reasonable causes like "it was blurry." That isn't the point. If you change the content, you have gone too far.
When you are editing photos, you should keep these standards in mind. How closely you need to adhere to them depends on your role. A picture that is "art" can be stylized, because the photographer is an artist. The artist has full artistic license. But a journalist is a journalist, and has journalistic standards, even when their medium is photography.
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Besides photo editing, the writer additionally regularly gives advice about this one in silver and pearl bracelets.
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