Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

There's been quite an uproar in the press over the last several days about a manipulated photo of Princess Kate and her kids. Kensington Palace released the photo a week ago to combat rumors that the Princess of Wales, who's not been seen in public since abdominal surgery, is in ill health or even dead. The picture shows her happy and healthy with her 3 children.

The uproar over this seemingly innocuous photograph arose quickly. Numerous photographers and digital image editors online quickly spotted small artifacts in the picture indicating it had been manipulated— or "photoshopped", as many call it.

In this particular picture all the artifacts are small. There's nothing so obvious here as a person with a third hand (because one was digitally added to the picture) or a curved doorway in the background (where someone "bent" the image, e.g., to make someone look curvier or slimmer). But still, it's become a scandal. "Water-Kate," some are quipping. Everyone from celebrities to even The Onion are bagging on Kate. In fact The Onion offers satirical recommendations from celebrities on how to 'shop better (12 Mar 2024).

Lost in the shuffle amid all the jeering and laughter is the reality of just how common "photoshopping" is in photography.

The term "photoshopping", BTW, refers to Adobe Photoshop, a powerful image manipulation tool published by Adobe. Photoshop has been common in industry for a long time. I started using it personally 30 years ago as a graduate student in 2D/3D computer imaging.

Pretty much all professional images you see online or in print have been processed through Photoshop or a tool like it. A good many image shared by amateurs have been "photoshopped", too. Virtually every image I publish in my blog has been touched up in Photoshop. Does being literally "photoshopped" mean they're all fake?

Just because an image has gone through Photoshop does not mean it is fake. There have been a number of interesting posts about that on X this week by Pete Souza, a respected pro photographer who worked in the Obama whitehouse. Souza took some of the most iconic photos of Obama during his time in office, including the famous photo in the Situation Room of the president and his team receiving live updates of Seal Team Six apprehending Osama Bin Laden. His thoughts are nicely summarized in a recent Buzzfeed article (15 Mar 2024).

As Souza explains, it's pretty much de rigeur for photographers to touch up pics by brightening or darkening, fixing highlights and shadows, and adjusting color balance. BTW, these are all modifications that could be done back in the days of film and paper photography, though they were very time consuming and required more skill than needed today with software like Photoshop. And for decades publishers have, correctly, accepted these alterations as reasonable.

Where publishers drawn the line on "Photoshopping" pics is adding, removing, or changing content from the image. Well, some publishers do that. In photojournalism it's not okay to remove an unwanted person from an image or edit the subject to make them look taller, slimmer, or curvier. In advertising, though... well, it's pretty much the rule that parts of the image have been faked to sell better.

In my own pics I do all of the things Souza talks about as normal. I adjust brightness levels and color curves. I also sharpen virtually all of my pics. That's because I keep in-camera sharpening set low as I don't particularly like it. Moreover, I apply sharpening anyway after resizing pics for online.

I also occasionally do the things Souza describes as no-nos for photojournalism: I edit out, or alter the shape of, people in the pics! I did that in one of the pics I shared earlier today from our hike at Flag Hill. Hawk was in one of the pics, a small figure in a wide shot, and her appearance was both distracting and unflattering. Since she was a small element of the pic I was able to edit her out pretty easily— by knowing what to do with Photoshop— and we both agreed the pic was better as a result.