Photo Manipulation and Ethics

A. People who manipulate images need to create the best image they can without being unethical.

People often manipulate a photo to the point where it is unethical or displaying some sort of falsity from the original picture.

Manipulating images has become so easy nowadays. It used to take hours, but now it just takes the knowledge of editing software.

Photographs often get edited to the point where they aren't accurate and show more of a lie than an actual image.

It's getting much harder to figure out what in pictures is authentic vs edited.

Those who edit pictures often neglect ethnics of photo editing because their job is to make a picture that grabs people's attention and draws them in to maybe read a news article or buy a certain product.

The boundary for which a photo goes from ethical to unethical varies. One person may think a picture is ethical while someone else may disagree.

Media editors have to balance creating the most appealing picture with keeping the picture ethical.

Some solutions are media editors increasing the number of photographers they know so they can get the best picture and have to do the least possible editing, creating a set of ethnical boundaries and sharing it with people so that others can input their opinion if they think it's unethical, or just creating a universal set of ethnic rules for all media.

B. These newspapers have very strict guidelines for ethnicity. They want to keep image manipulation to a minimum to preserve as much authenticity of images as they can. Photographs, to them, are the visuals for events. Even with the words of articles and stories, newspapers use images as authentic visualization for the readers and even the writers.

C. I feel that some editing is ok, and maybe even necessary. Cropping, for example, should be used to remove distracting or unimportant aspects from a picture without erasing important details or major parts of it. Blurring can be used to fade out the unimportant to make readers focus on what the newspaper wants to be focused on without obstructing possibly significant sections. Changing color or color tone may be useful for making an image easier to look at or highlight what's important, but it shouldn't be drastic enough to do something such as change the skin tone of someone's picture or modify the setting of the picture. Cropping and adding to a picture might be necessary, but almost should never be used. It's basically adding elements to a photograph to create a false scene. However, I do feel it has some use, I just am not sure what.

D. 

I feel this picture is the most unethical: an attempt to expose a Republican politician by creating a somewhat inappropriate image that negatively emphasized the Conservative view of gun rights. Not only did this picture place someone's face on a body that was not their own, but it was a completely false picture that attempted to give someone a bad political reputation.

E. 

I feel that this picture is the lease unethical. It didn't do anything to alter the visual appearance of a person or create a misleading scene, it just needed to fit the magazine and be presentable. Though the image is distorted, changing the size of a dim picture of only part of 2 pyramids doesn't seem like a very big deal.