Hello,

I've been recently asked to moderate an online art community. One of the tasks I am dealing with is to define the difference between a photograph and a manipulation. Of course, obvious manipulation is easy to define, but what about subtle manipulation where it's not so easily detectable. Like combining two images to make one -- photo or manip? Look at this photo for an example: http://emarts.gfxartist.com/artworks/73613

In fact look at all my photos in my gallery. Almost all of them have some amount of retouching done to them. Do they belong in the Photography section or the Photo manipulation section? How much retouching is too much retouching.

I have my own opinions, but I'd like to hear others.

In my opinion it depends on the purpose of the manip and photography 'sections'.
I think perhaps it would be better to have either subsection of the photography forum for retouched photos that arent manips - ie colour balance, retouching the model etc, perfecting things that didnt quite come out as you wanted in the picture but not major manipulation.

If it were me I would want to keep the photography section purely for 'straight out of the camera' shots. A place to showcase your photography skills. The subsection would be more for 'concept photography' where you show the reworked picture as you wanted it to come out. Then have the photo manipulation section for more 'obvious manipulations'

We don't blink if a writer runs a first draft through their spell-checker, or gives it to a proofreader to look things over, or makes their own revisions for the purpose of clarity. No one complains if a sound engineer filters out static and background garble to make a recording more coherent. It's no different with images: the medium can serve to convey content, it can distort content and it can fabricate content. It all depends on the content that is being conveyed and its intended purpose.

What is the intent of the photo? If a family picture has mom looking the wrong way or Aunt Nelly with her eyes closed, and you splice in a better head or face, I'd say that's a creative enhancement, not quite a captured moment of reality perhaps, but cetainly not a deception or distortion of the reality meant to be captured. On the other hand, if you splice in a hooker sitting on Uncle John's lap, and Uncle John didn't know anything about it, then you've got a ethics problem, and so will poor Uncle John. If you enhance contrast or make the colors cleaner, those moves serve to make the content clearer. On the other hand, if you, the photographer, are being judged on the quality of your shots right out of the camera, and you help things along with a curve or two, that's cheating. The fact that we CAN improve quality means that we will. We're still stuck with the responsibility to judge for ourselves whether or not, in the context of what we want the image to convey, we are illuminating our message or inventing it.

This weekend I took some pictures of my family with my mobile phone camera.
After running them through noise ninja they're fine from my familys point of view. Just your standard snaps and not bad considering where they came from.

In photoshop I could turn them into some amazing pictures, but if I posted them on a photography site then that would be deceptive.

For those that care about the 'content' they're fine as they are. But in on a peer to peer level its not about the 'content' its about technique and skill, straight from the camera should be separated from retouched pictures but they shouldnt necessarily be lumped into photo manipulations.

I think this to be a highly subjective question, as Nancy suggested, by defining it in terms of your own use.

Technically speaking, especially now that digital imaging is so prevalent, and the software used to acquire images from a camera (or scanner for that matter) manipulates the photo from the onset one could argue that all digital images are in a sense manipulations. Drawing a line between what one considers a photo and a manipulation would be hard to do on a large scale.

On a not so technical scale, I personally am of the opinion that a manipulation involves some major change from the original. I think that basic adjustments, touching up areas that are original to a photo are not manipulations. But again I am sure that someone will say that anything done to an original image is a manipulation.

I think for all practical purposes I would say that the example you gave would be best served by being in the Photography section as it is well done and as you described, it is the same hat from the same shoot.

Just my opinion, I'm sure there will differing ones and I'm likely to agree in one way or another with mostly all of them ;)

Hi there, garazon. Welcome to RetouchPRO :bigthmb:
(nice contest entry too! :thumbsup: )

In the "old days" (which at the rate things are changing means 10 / 20 years ago) things were easier. Taking a parallel from sound processing (like edgework), we used to have an LP, a single, a tape or maybe even a new-fangled CD - but we always had a physical medium.
Nowadays the content is separated from the medium. We have an .mp3 file, but it could be anywhere - on your drive, a CD, a DVD, an Ipod or flying over the internet. If you want to get philosophical, you could even say that you don't actually have anything - just pure information.

Photography has gone the same way. It used to be easy to know what a photograph was, it would (usually) be a physical print made from a physical negative. Now, with digital camaras, there is absolutely no medium - only content. The end effect is that we have no way of telling the difference between the "original" and "manipulated" versions unless....a) the manipulation can be detected because it was badly done or, b) the manipulator owns up.

In your case, I'd say that the best you could do is to say, "Post your manipulated images here and the straight-out-of-the-camera images there" and just hope that everyone is a honest as Nancy.

Rô

Oh! Here it comes again!! :tongue:

This type of discussion comes up every so often. So let me add the following:

First of all how do you define "straight out of the camera"? A lot of the time folks kind of think that means like with film, images that have not been manipulated in Photoshop or other types of progams like that. As one who spent over 30 years in film based photography before going digital, and who printed almost all of his own negatives, I manipulated my prints like crazy in all those darkrooms! I was always sticking my hands into that beam of light and dodging some area of the print or hitting the timer again and burning in something etc etc. In a strict meaning, croping a print is a manipulation. And what about shooting black and white? If thats not a manipulation of a scene what is?

So with film, about the only way one can get a "straight out of the camera" image is by using slide film, and that only works if you do not use any kind of cross processing....

So while I do believe that one should strive to get the best possiable image from the start, why does it matter? In the trip to a great final image, manipulation is but a step or two.

....yes, agreed, what came straight-out-of-the-camara wasn't the print (except Polaroid, maybe).
It would be the negative, but even that has to undergo some processing!

I always find it rather amusing when we say that we are posting a "photo".
As you say, the print is not actually the starting point in the process - and then it got scanned, quantized, pixelated, resized, and JPEG crunched to 100k.
And after all that we call it the "original" image!

Rô

I think the question is answered by the intent of the manipulation of the image.

Yes, putting an in-focus hat made your daughters pretty brown eyes show better but the level of manipulation was to do what the image was for in the first place; show the pretty eyes on the pretty girl.

Had this shot been for some other purpose -perhaps a forensics or photo-journalistic or even a scientific use then; the manipulation would have had to have been labeled.

Although we can't allow this question to destroy photography, The selection of the speed and stop is a manipulation in the strictest sense.

A good rule of thumb is to find out what major newspapers and news journals have as photo correction guidelines. In their case there can be severe penalties for crossing the line between correction and manipulation so newspapers and news journals have to have well defined criteria as to what constitutes a photo manipulation. Obviously it is a subjective questions and it does depend on your intent but this may be a good place to start.

In order to keep things simple you may just want to reduce it to global corrections vs. masks, screens, cloning... etc.

This is a good resource to get you started

http://www.nppa.org/professional_development/self-training_resources/eadp_report/

You can click on the links to the left for more information.

where can one find access to the newspapers' photo correction guidelines? Do you just ask for them?

I just typed in :Newspaper photography guidelines" in Google and found a lot of information there. You could also try calling up your local paper and asking.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/contact_us/about/9057200.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

http://www.journalism.org/resources/tools/ethics/codes/photojournalism.asp

http://www.60-seconds.com/168_ethics.html

etc.

As moderator, you're not expected to be the manipulation police. If Uncle John tries to pass off that image with the hooker as a manipulation, it's not really your job to bar him from the forum.

All you really care about is that discussions are on topic. An image discussed from the point of vue of its photography goes in the photography forum; an image discussed from the point of vue of manipulation goes in the manipulation forum.

Pierre

Photoshop: Edgework, you forgot to post the photo with Uncle John :grin: .

This discussion got me thinking back to some work I did about a year ago. I was taking some shots of a family who had just moved into a new home and they wanted a particular photo of their daughter against a certain wall, (because of the wallpaper having a pattern they liked and thought would be a good background). However no matter where the subject was positioned, a portion of an undraped window would show up. I told them I could remove that afterwards and they were delighted. So what they consider a "photograph" is now on their wall. To them it is a photograph.

Intent and venue seem to be the consensus here, seems to be the safest way to try and sort things out.. As someone said an altered photo probably wouldn't hold up well as such forensics or representing a news story, but to a someone wanting a picture of their child, manipualtions can be worth more.

I think that with the advances we have seen so far in digital imaging, and the rate things are going, this type of discussion may all be a moot point in the future, as surely some terms we've come to know will have to be redefined, and new terms will have to come into use.


Hi there, garazon. Welcome to RetouchPRO :bigthmb:
(nice contest entry too! :thumbsup: )


Thanks for the Welcome and the compliment Rô. Glad I found this place. :grin:

G

Thanks everyone for your replies. I think you've got me going in the right direction. It would seem that the intent is the important part. As someone mentioned, it's not my job as moderator to be the manipulation police. However, I was asked for my input in defining certain rules regarding the breakdown of categories.

I think by asking the question of the artist, "What is your intent?" will certainly have a role in determining which category to place their image. An image may even have quite a bit of "manipulation" in it but still be in the photography section, if the intent was to tell a story with the image. If the artist though is displaying his ability to manipulate an image, then manipulation category would be correct. Or if the manipulation itself is part of the subject, like "speed" can be a subject for a picture. This way, they will receive the kind of feedback they are looking for.

Thanks again for all your comments! :happy:

technically, if you alter one pixel then it's a manipulation. however, there is another use of that term that is used also and much more common. there are classes of alterations in digital. you have 'retouching', 'restoration', 'reconstruction', 'photo-art', 'colorization', and 'manipulations'. each of these has its own characteristics. yes, they could all be called manipulations, technically. but mechanically, there are differences.

a retouch is usually to correct some minor fault, either in the picture taking or in the subject matter. the lighting was a bit off, the subject had a pimple, and small things like this.

a restoration is usually a bit more extensive and has another purpose, to bring an image back to its original state. this involves remove mold, scratches, dust marks, textures, and so on. it generally is also only removing unwanted things but on a larger scale to restore an original.

reconstruction often is lumped into the same category as restoring. i make the distinction that when pieces of the image are actually missing then it's a reconstruction. a corner is gone, large tear marks exist and parts of the data are no longer there and so on.

photo-art is the manipulation with the intent of altering the image into something more or differently aesthetic, or with the intent of telling a better story. it often involves filters and brushes and techniques designed to do just that.

colorization is simply that, colorizing the image either further than what it already is or turning it newly into a color image.

manipulation is the act of interjecting new items or removing existing items from an image. so, if i put a puppy into the picture with the baby, that's a manipulation. likewise if i remove aunt may from the baby picture, that's a manipulation.

now, none of those definitions are necessarily ever 'pure'. sure, there's overlap. and sure more than one defined item may get used in a single image. so, you remove aunt may, add the ball, change the contrast, fix a blown out area, put some texture back in baby's face and so on and so on. so, some images are going to be composites of techniques and classes. that's ok. as to how you class a single image and therefore sort and post and store it, may be a bit of a trick at times. but, as long as you can justify it in at least one correct class, then it's really not going to make that much difference.

we get folks wanting 'critiques' posting in the 'help wanted' section. well, they want help, so it fits. or someone will post a notice about a piece of retouching software in the retouching forum rather than the software forum. well, it does apply to retouching, so it's not totally out of place. though, i'd rather have all software related links in one place for easy finding.

and, most forum software also has the ability to move a thread without removing. i forget what it's called, but basically the thread is still listed in the forum in which it was originally posted, but when you click on it and then back out of it, you now find yourself in another forum where it was link-moved (or whatever it's called). or, you can actually move it.

so, dont get too hung up in the semantics of it all. we all love a good picture, no matter where it's stored :)

Craig

Actually, I prefer the term Photo Editing. I used to work for a catelog company, and that's what they called it. And for me it really describes what we do. We take a body of work and edit it to whatever level is necessary.

I'm not trying to get too hung up on the semantics, but artists are a sensitive bunch. I reccommended a photo to be moved to the manipulation category, as it contained obvious compositing. But the artist would rather remove it than move it. His point was that his photo, as compared to the others in the manipulation category was not made for manipulation's sake.

That got me thinking and made me start this thread and ask you guys. the general consensus pretty much fit his argument that the intent of the artist and the image he creates is the deciding factor when it's not so obvious. so I PMd him back and thanked him for giving me a new perspective. And I thank you folks here for the same thing.

emarts, glad to hear that it all worked out!

and, most forum software also has the ability to move a thread without removing. i forget what it's called, but basically the thread is still listed in the forum in which it was originally posted, but when you click on it and then back out of it, you now find yourself in another forum where it was link-moved (or whatever it's called). or, you can actually move it.Methinks you mean Redirect, that's what it's called here anyhow. we get three options: Move, Move and leave Redirect, Copy.

and, Craig, looking forward to seeing your input over at the glossary forum (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12036). :cool:

Rô

thank you, Ro. redirect was what i was trying to remember. and i believe i have made an input in the glossary before; just not on this subject :)

Craig