Unmanipulated Photos

When you submit a photograph to the photo.net Gallery, you have the option of declaring that the photograph is "unmanipulated". Why is this, and what does it mean?

Why declare that an image is not manipulated?

In many applications of photography, it is extremely important that a photograph be created through as as straight-forward a transfer as possible from what was recorded on the film or the imaging sensor of the camera to the image the viewer sees. Obvious examples would be photographs presented as evidence in a court case, as part of a medical record, with an insurance claim, or as an illustration of a news article in a newspaper or journalistic article. Photographs presented in such contexts are assumed by their viewers to be literally true, to be non-fictional documentation, testimony or reporting. A photographer breaks faith with the viewer and violates important canons of professional ethics if he manipulates the photographs so that they are not what he or she witnessed and what the camera captured. Other photographic genres, such as wildlife and nature photography have equally strong ethical strictures against manipulated images. Presenting a manipulated photograph in such an context is the moral equivalent of lying, and may literally be perjury.

In other domains of photography, non-manipulation of images is less of a moral imperative than in these examples. Nobody is morally outraged to learn that an advertising photograph has been manipulated, and indeed, most of them are elaborately staged pre-exposure and manipulated post-exposure.

While there is not always a moral imperative to present unmanipulated photographs, many people who are primarily interested in photography as an art form believe that knowledge of whether or not photographs have been manipulated is of critical importance when looking at and aesthetically appraising them -- that unmanipulated images which faithfully represent what the photographer witnessed are aesthetically very different from images that were synthesized in the darkroom or in an image-editing program like Photoshop. The many adherents of this view hold that there is a completely different aesthetic involved in venturing into the world with a camera and recording and documenting what one finds, than in going into a darkroom, or sitting at a computer and synthesizing images from various bits and pieces of photos and other image resources, using one's imagination and lith masks, chemicals, drawing and painting skills, or software. For people holding such views, the unique and special feature of photography as an art form is its ability to record meaningful images from what is found by the artist in the world, and that manipulating images reduces photography to just another tool for creating imagery. Some exponents of this view would even deny that manipulated photographs are photographs at all, and would urge the use of a different term for them.

photo.net does not take sides in this aesthetic debate. However, we do wish to provide viewers with accurate information as to whether or not images are manipulated so that those viewers who consider this critical can make their own judgements about the images.

Accordingly, we ask photographers submitting images to check a box that states that an image is "Unmanipulated", provided of course that it is indeed unmanipulated. If the box is not checked (which is the default), viewers should assume that the image is manipulated.

What is an unmanipulated image?

Our definition is very strict; we ask that people checking the box do not mentally create their own definition, or take the following only as guidelines or suggestions. If the photograph does not literally meet these requirements please do not check the "unmanipulated" box.

On photo.net an unmanipulated photograph is one that could be presented in a court of law or printed in a newspaper, without dishonesty or perjury by the photographer, as an accurate record of what the photographer saw and the camera captured, with the absolute minimum disturbance of the capture during the processing and finishing stages. A slide processed through standard chemistry is the paradigm for an unmanipulated image, and other types of photographs should strive, within the limits of technology, to be as close as possible to slides with respect to manipulation.

Futhermore,

• The image should be the result of a single exposure (shutter release) by the camera. Therefore, stitched panoramic images, multiple exposures, or composites of more than one image are all manipulated images for our purposes here.
• Contrast adjustments and color balance adjustments may be made in enlargement and printing, scanning software, image editing software, etc, as may selective darkening or lightening of areas of the photograph (dodging and burning). But these should not be so extreme as to render the image an inaccurate or unrealistic representation of what the photographer saw. (It is not intended that this be interpreted in some psychological way -- for example that Van Gogh's colors were in some subjective sense what he "saw".) Features may not be so darkened or lightened or changed in color that the effect is the same as if they were removed by a cloning tool. All images on photo.net are digital files, and most of these go through post-exposure color space conversions. We don't state what transformations are allowed, but the emphasis should be on realism and the result should be as true to the original as practical, or at least should not be any more unrealistic than the effects produced by selecting normally available films.
• Sharpening tools are OK.
• Cloning/airbrushing tools may only be used to remove miniscule processing artifacts, such as produced by dust, not to add features that were not captured by the camera or to move or remove unwanted features that were captured.
• No use of blurring tools is allowed.
• No use of perspective correction tools is allowed. Any perspective correction must be done pre-exposure through camera movements or PC lenses.
• Cropping is OK.
• Images created by processing film through non-standard chemistry such as "cross processing" are manipulated images.
• Pre-exposure manipulations such as staging scenes before the camera are OK, but should be disclosed in the Technical Details if the "unmanipulated" box is checked, and the caption should not lead the viewer to any false conclusions, such as implying that an animal is in the wild, when it was actually photographed in a zoo.
• colorizing a black and white image is not allowed.
• desaturating a color image to make it black and white is OK, provided the desaturation is complete and not selective.

It should be emphasized that there is no requirement that all images submitted to photo.net meet these requirements. These standards apply only to images that are declared by the photographer to be "unmanipulated".