This heavily manipulated image of a great white attacking a military helicopter in front of golden gate was a true Internet e-mail "hit" in 2001.

“Photoshoped” have become a term bordering on an insult lately with the advent of digital photography. There seems to be a fairly vocal and widespread sentiment that altering and manipulating images is something fairly new, and a negative thing done by photographers and photo editors lacking scruples and integrity. Especially in fashion photography there have been numerous cases over the past few years with ridiculously retouched models looking more like something from outer space than real human beings. I understand very well the general scepticism, both from the general public and conservative old-school photographers. Yet, it also gets me thinking of what photography really is and I’m left with a feeling that many do not understand or comprehend the technical and physical nature of the photographic process, nor the properties of light. So I ask and try to answer -  to freeze a moment in time, to make a true and genuine replication of a scene, is it in fact possible?

The key term I think, is interpretation, because that’s really what this is all about, whether you see something with your own eyes, or view a photography of the same scene. Any photograph, regardless if it is created by digital or analogue means, is subject of many layers of interpretation, from the characteristics of the optical elements of a lens to the medium it is recorded on. Traditional film is made from light-sensitive chemicals that are placed on a piece of solid material that can be for instance plastic, glass or metal. Various combinations of chemicals give various characteristics to the film. It may be black and white, it may be color, it may be very saturated with strong contrast, or very low contrast and subdued hues/tones. To put it simple, the kind of film used strongly affects how reality looks like photographed. This is only the beginning, it only gets more complicated. How the film is developed, that is, what kind of chemicals are used, for how long and on what kind of paper the print is made, will also contribute to the look and feel of the final image. Further on, photographs can, after the initial development, be heavily manipulated in the darkroom by the skilled technician, areas made darker or brighter, unwanted elements removed, tonality changed and so forth. This have, would you believe it, been going on since the very infancy of photography, back in the mid 19th century.

Many of the more noticeable names in photography spent a lot of time in their darkrooms. For instance the highly praised American icon Ansel Adams, a legendary landscape photographer, was a true master of the darkroom and printing who could spend days and weeks over a single image to get it the way he wanted. A lot of people don’t really know about this stuff, as they was and is used to deliver their film to a lab and get it processed there, they never see or hear of the many tweaks and adjustments made even by modern and for the major part, automatic labs. When you’re not aware of what can be done with film in the darkroom, it’s no wonder you think that snapping the shots is all there is to manipulation.

A 150 year old example of photo manipulation, Abe Lincolns head stuck on another politicians body.

In digital image processing we see a lot of the old darkroom terms and phrases used for processes that give similar results, although the actual process is clearly vastly different, there’s no smelly chemicals in digital image processing. One example of an analogue technique and term gone digital is “unsharp mask” which is not really about blurring an image, but sharpening it (or to be technically correct, making the image appear sharper to the human eye from a certain viewing distance). Unsharp mask is one of the most common techniques used when preparing images for printing and web use.

Okay, so if that’s the deal with film, that image manipulation was so common and well known that phrases used in film manipulation have got carried on into the digital world, what is really the fuss with digital image manipulation?

One might now suggest, if ignoring key factors such as exposure, viewpoint and focal length as manipulative techniques, that a straight out-of-the-camera digital image, that must be a “true” image, after all no manipulation is done to it,  just downloaded it to a computer and viewed it, done no fancy schmancy stuff to it. Well, sorry to break it to you, but it’s a bit more complicated than that and just like film, the physics of the light-sensitive medium and the way it is constructed, affects the final outcome. A digital sensor haven’t got light sensitive chemicals, instead it captures and generates an electrical charge from the photons, which is the elementary particles that light consist of. This current can then again be converted to raw digital data. Now, the raw digital data is on its own pretty useless, it’s just a lot of data and it have to be further processed to become an image you can actually view. You might have noticed that your camera have “profiles” you can choose from, different profiles results in images with different colors, tonality and so forth. These profiles are in many ways just a set of parameters that process the raw data in slightly different ways to give final images with different characteristics. Older digital cameras may only have the choice between black and white and color, but it’s the same thing as the multitude of profiles modern cameras offer, a set of parameters that the RAW data is processed with. All digital cameras capture RAW data first and then convert/processes these 1′s and 0′s into a format that is viewable on a computer, most commonly .jpg. In this process a lot of information gets thrown away, because a format like .jpg is a compressed format, and it is not loss-less. This is why photo-enthusiasts and professionals often shoot RAW, as they have cameras with the ability to store the more or less unaltered RAW data. During post processing with the right software, they have more data to work with, something that theoretically results in better quality final images. Computers have powerful processors and the human mind and eye is more aware of nuances and details than the automated algorithms and parameters the camera work with.

This image of Fillipa Hamilton have been all over the news the last few weeks and the spark that have reignited the photo manipulation debate recently.

What I’m trying to explain is that the light that initially hit the sensor has already been subject of manipulation and interpretation even before you load it up in Photoshop. Also, even for images that do not appear manipulated, like documentary news paper shots and the likes, it is very common to alter contrast, often in certain areas of the image only, improve sharpness, enhance tonality and adjust colors. Why? It makes the images look better! For fashion and non-journalistic photographs the post processing may involve everything from cloning away an ugly mole or the power-lines ruining an otherwise beautiful landscape, to making a model slimmer with pearly white teeth. It is not uncommon for photographers to use hours and days working images that they used a few minutes to set up, plan and shoot. Manipulating images is almost completely necessary to compete in this industry, regardless if you’re just a wedding photog or an artist. It is commonly suggested that minor adjustments to color, contrast and similar, is “ok”, because it does not really alter the contents of the photograph. I’m forced to ask, then what is the limit?

If you convert a photo to black and white, you remove a lot of information and often completely change the feel and understanding of the specific scene. You change what the viewer feels when he examine the image. What is the difference from removing a mole or doing other manipulation and why should the removal of the aforementioned mole be a sin, while changing colors is all right? My point is this, digital or film, it does not matter, none are more “true” than the other, they are just slightly different means of capturing reflected light onto something that is of vastly inferior capacity compared to an human eye and memory. Analogue photography is not anymore “real” than digital photography, it is just an interpretation with a wide range of technical and practical limitations and pitfalls determining the final outcome. Heavily photoshoped images can be stunningly beautiful, just as the same scene shot on film. They will differ, especially in colors and texture of the final print, but none can be said to truly represent the scene as we saw it.

Another element in this whole shebang is the human one. The human eye and the brain is also just a filter that subconsciously converts and conveys information to your consciousness. You’re probably aware that we only see a limited part of the actual light flowing all around us, infrared for instance, is invisible to the human eye. Our brains also do funny things to the light hitting our retinas, it notices and enhances certain things and ignores others. Cultural background (for instance various colors are perceived to have different meanings in different cultures) as well as deep-down fundamental instincts play a key role. It’s completely understandable that our brains will react to and highlight dangerous things that we see, it’s a result of evolution. Yet, it also means that what we see is not really as genuine as we might think, more like a limited excerpt of the full picture.

Nikita Krushchev apparently using his shoe to make a point in an UN meeting in 1960.

So, if our brains and eyes are not capable of showing us the truth, who are we to criticize manipulated images, especially when knowing that even images we would consider “pure” and “unaltered” are in fact not so? It’s a philosophical question and I don’t have the answer to it. But I’ll be so bold as to suggest we might want keep in mind that every image we’ve ever seen is the result of many layers and levels of manipulation. From the photographers choice of viewpoint, focal length and exposure to the medium and the development/processing of it. A photo that to your eye appears to be a representative and mirror-like remake of real life can only be so due to considerable manipulation of image-making technologies, and it only shows a resemblance that looks real to our human eyes and brains, which are, if ever so brilliant, equally prone to misinterpretation and subjectivity. Reality is very, very relative.