Digital editing is performed by all photographers. In fact, the more WOW! Factor a photo has, the greater the likelihood the photo has been digitally edited, perhaps even to the point of “manipulation.” This is the dirty secret that most point-and-shoot photographers never learn: your camera, however sophisticated and expensive, will never take these pictures out of the box; you have to post-process the pictures.

So, when readers pointed out that the winning entry in the recent Word Press Photo contest looks obviously digitally manipulated (with a very pronounced tone enhancement), World Press Photo got defensive and, after submitting the photo to Fourandsix Technologies for “forensic analysis,” declared the winning entry’s digital editing totally acceptable.

Just what did photographer Paul Hansen do to his winning photo to stir such controversy?

The experts at Fourandsix Technologies found that though Hansen’s winning photo was “retouched with respect to both global and local color and tone,” they “find no evidence of significant photo manipulation or compositing.” So, what is the problem? Why is there even a controversy?

It is because the tonal enhancements applied to the photo is so very obvious to the naked eyes. Many photographers who have played with so-called HDR photography can spot the over-the-top digital enhancements right away. However, World Press Photo has officially given its blessing that such heavily enhanced photos are acceptable as journalistic photos and so falls within their rule that “retouching which conforms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.”

Even without any digital editing, the content of Hansen’s winning photo packs such a punch as to stop you in your track and elicits a reaction. In our view, that photo deserves to win but requires zero to minimal digital editing. It is sad that the controversy about how much digital editing is acceptable has relegated the content of the photo into the background.

View the before and after pictures.

via Imaging Resource

When photography was done with film cameras, there was no way to see the final result until the image was developed and printed. During the printing/enlargement process, the photographer would employ certain techniques in the darkroom to lighten (“dodge”) and/or darken (“burn”) certain parts of the image to bring out the details and colors. Nobody thought there was anything wrong with these darkroom techniques. More radical image processing techniques, such as solarization, were obviously in the realm of image manipulation, though perfectly acceptable as an art form.

With digital photography, the darkroom is replaced by an image editing software, such as Photoshop. Without getting your hands dirty or spilling foul chemicals all over your darkroom (bathroom for many of us), we are able to try various image editing techniques to obtain the results we’re after. For years, professional photographers have kept more or less mum about just how much post processing they do to their images. As is now more and more apparent, image post processing goes much further than mere lightening and darkening. It often even strays into what would be considered as digital image manipulation territory, with techniques such as removing unwanted elements, cloning areas, adding colors, adding sunlight, etc.

Take, for example, the beautiful “Stirling Ranges” picture by Peter Eastway. In this article at Luminous Landscape, he shows you how he took a beautifully composed photograph (though not quite with the Wow! factor — the kind that you take all the time, right?) and convert it into a masterpiece in Photoshop. By the way, that photograph was taken with a nearly US $44,000 medium-format Phase One IQ180 on a 645DF body that captures 80-megapixel photos measuring 10,328 by 7,760 pixels. So bigger and costlier and more megapixels do not necessarily guarantee better pictures.

Continue Reading »

Photoshop has made digital manipulation as easy as selecting and deleting. This video shows how to edit photos, remove flares and even fill up panoramas. Remember that photos edited in this way qualify as digital manipulation and should never be represented as your “photographs.” Most photo contests will not accept photos digitally manipulated the way the video shows.

via jest

Harold Merklinger over at Luminous Landscape has an interesting article titled “The Game of Photography — What Are the Rules?”

It’s about whether digital manipulation is cheating or acceptable photography. He makes an excellent point about the difference between amateur and professional photographers. As an amateur photographer, you follow no rules except your own. So, if you digitally manipulate a picture and the end result gives you great pleasure, then why not? [No rules to break = no cheating.] On the other hand, a professional photographer (as in one who does it for a living) must follow the client’s rules. [Photojournalism, for example, accepts absolutely no digital manipulation of a news photo; they break the rules, they cheat.]

Continue Reading »

Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of CoverGirl, “voluntarily” pulled a print spot featuring Taylor Swift for “excessive Photoshopping.” The ad made claims about the NatureLuxe Mousse Mascara that the National Advertising Division (NAD) — the ad industry’s self-regulatory body created to review factual claims in national advertisements — found could not be substantiated except by “post-production enhancement.”

Looks to me like either the NAD missed about a gizzilion other ads — or the players involved chose not to “voluntarily” comply.

Read the article at: E! online.

The secret of many beautiful pictures from pros is that they are heavily photoshopped. The skills lie in the post processing ability to take a mundane photograph and add pizazz to it. We look, wonder at the beautiful light, about the exposure settings, equipment used, etc. when more often than not, the magic happened in Photoshop.

Case in point is The Belmonte Castle picture which won a Gold Award at the 2008 Canon AIPP Australian Professional Photography Awards. In this article over at Luminous Landscape, Peter Eastway explains how he took a rather ordinary looking photo of the castle (6 photos in fact, stitched together) and, in post processing, cloned a tree, squeezed the picture to make everything look taller, added a color that was not there in the original scene and added direction to the light to add drama — and to create a beautiful print and win the prize.

Note that in contrast to many professional photography contests where digital manipulation is strictly prohibited, Canon’s photo contests tend to allow extensive digital manipulation of images.

Read the article and view the images at: Luminous Landscape.

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

We will soon need stronger mechanisms to guarantee that a photo has not been altered. Not only is it relatively simple to digitally manipulate a photo today in Photoshop, but even more powerful algorithms are coming out to digitally manipulate a photo: e.g. the capability to insert an object into an existing photo so that one cannot tell that it was added.

Supplementary material video for our 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia paper (see the project page here: http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.html). 3D objects are rendered using LuxRender (http://www.luxrender.net).

Authors: Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth, Derek Hoiem

Abstract: We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference. Further, our study shows that our method is competitive with other insertion methods while requiring less scene information. We also collected new illumination and reflectance datasets; renderings produced by our system compare well to ground truth. Our system has applications in the movie and gaming industry, as well as home decorating and user content creation, among others.

via laughingsquid

There have been a number of high profile cases recently about digital manipulation [just search for digital manipulation in our search bar at top right] and how they were considered to be “cheating.”

But, come to think of it, every digital picture is manipulated to some extent — whether in camera by the camera’s own firmware or by the photographer in post-editing in an image editing software.

For example, when you use the HDR function in your digital camera, it takes two or three pictures at different exposures, combine them in-camera and output one picture. This is digital manipulation, but it is not cheating. Your camera has simply used a technique manually applied by photographers throughout time immemorial, whether using digital or film. Film photographers would “dodge” and “burn” to apply less and more exposure to certain areas of a print to coax out the hidden details already captured on film. Likewise, digital editing to bring out what the camera has captured is I believe appropriate and even necessary.

In fact, that is often what sets the professional and the amateur apart. Beginner photographers who wonder why their expensive DSLRs do not take as good pictures as the same camera in the hands of a pro are missing the fact that digital editing is part and parcel of the digital image creation.

This is what Mark Schacter over at Luminous Landscape explains so clearly in his article “Am I a Photographic Cheat?”

Read Am I a Photographic Cheat? @ Luminous Landscape.

Another magazine is taken in by the continuing saga of digital manipulation, this time of Kate Middleton in her wedding dress. When Grazia magazine put Kate on the cover of their special edition, she was pictured with a tiny waist that drew public outrage. Well, after Britain’s Press Complaints Commission investigated and ruled that the magazine had doctored the image, Grazia has decided to come clean and is now admitting to the digital manipulation. Apparently, the editors of Grazia magazine wanted a picture of Kate standing all by herself and made the fateful decision to clone her left arm and part of her left waist onto the right side. Perhaps every copy of Photoshop should from now on include a warning about when not to digitally manipulate images?

Read the story and view the images at: Yahoo!