Photo retouching in the media
I’ve been debating a question of photo retouching as it relates to factual reporting in the news. Clearly, “adding and removing important content” risks distorting the information conveyed by a photograph. What about retouching such as removing blemishes, correcting color, or altering the lighting / contrast / or levels ?
What brought this to the forefront for me was my post about the Lunar Moth. The event was real. The moth was spread out flat on the grass. I did various cleanup procedures on the image and changed the lighting to better present the moth. Here is the before and after. You get to decide if it was to maintain the photograph’s presentation of fact.
The image was straitened, color corrected, sharpened (perhaps a bit too much), and a faint darkening of the grass under the moth to make it stand out. The most dramatic “touch up” was to repair to all the damage of the wings. It is this last element - in my opinion - that makes this less factual and more “art”. If it were scratches in an old photo, that would be artificial damage and the repairs would be more warranted. In this case, it represents a natural occurrence which the camera captured.
