Is there anyone out there care to comment about retouching news photos?
If so, what are the journalistic ethics, rules for processing news photos.

See this: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003780.htm

Ken

Remember the OJ retouch where the tone of his skin was dramatically altered? No laws were broken, no guidelines were transgressed, but the intent was to create an effect on the part of the viewer that went beyond mere information. I'd say this falls into the same category. You generally want to brighten detail, make the information as clear to the viewer as possible, but something like this adds information, in a biased manner. I'd say throw the rascals out.

Thanks, Edgework.

Yes, I remember the OJ picture and the one of Kerry and Jane Fonda. Plus, there was a image from the Irag war where the photog combined one frame with another to enhance the scene. He was fired.

But what can newspaper image people do and not do? Can they improve contrast, detail, shadow and highlights or not? It would seem to me, that anything one could do in the old wet darkroom one should be able to do now.

k

Ken, that's a VERY BIG question.

Here are some interesting links......
- a bit of history (http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/chapter6.html);

- Official guideline (http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2004/07/nppa_adopts_new_ethics_code.html);

- details, Do's and Don'ts (http://www.digitalcustom.com/howto/mediaguidelines.asp);

The good news it that it's a pretty much a self-regulating system. If the news media is caught out manipulating photos (i. e. the truth), then it will lose credibility. IF credibility was a selling point, then they lose sales.

Rô

The photo on USA Today looks normal, i.e. non-doctored. It does not look like the "possessed" version shown on the Michelle Malkin site.

Pierre

Oh wow!! They just changed it and put a disclaimer on the site. That was fast.

It happens ALL the time, you only notice it if you KNOW it (or find out later).

Eg. A magazine here called Filmink (a movie mag, if you don't know it or don't get it) had a picture of a very pretty girl named Alexis Bledel. Fantastic blue eyes, just a little too fantastic - yep, the original had normal blue, not vivid, and it had some skin blemishes and spots..

People react to an image and it's in the news/magazines interests to maintain an image, whether good or bad (depending on the propaganda they want you to accept).

Thanks, Edgework.

But what can newspaper image people do and not do? Can they improve contrast, detail, shadow and highlights or not? It would seem to me, that anything one could do in the old wet darkroom one should be able to do now.

k

Is it journalism, or is it creative license? It's no less difficult on the print side. One can slant a sentence simply by ordering the elements: "He seemed like a good father, but he drank an awful lot." as opposed to "He drank a lot, but he seemed like a good father."

If they'd put horns on her head and a wart on her nose, it'd be an easy call. The single most important element in journalism, print or photo, is that the medium should be as transparent as possible, allowing the information to come through unfiltered, undistored, and without opinion. (Yeah, right.) Just because it is now easier to alter an image than thirty years ago doesn't mean we need expect less of our journalists. It's always been easy to fabricate, distort and slant the printed word, yet we still hold our reporters to a standard of unbiased accuracy. Any modification that makes the actual information clearer and more understandable is fair game. Editors do the same thing to their reporters' copy all the time. There is a line between editing and falsifying, and, like the judge said of porn, you might not always know how to describe it, but you know it when you see it.