There’s some rabble (1, 2, 3) lately on the Web about the various (poor) news photography Photoshopping and general editorial interpretation by photographers (one a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less). In these cases some ethical line has been crossed, and severely misleading. A good friend at Getty Images mentions that no one is allowed to at least crop the images, nor are the photo editors, and they are maintained as raw captures straight from camera.
I understand keeping the integrity of a capture, but I would dispute one small, minor point.
There’s no such thing as ‘raw’ from the camera; it’s a myth. That’s like saying a photographic print positive is straight from the camera; it’s simply not.
Setting aside the fact that when a photographer frames an image, and what that person sees and when they timed the capture is already subjective; lets look at the technical aspect of an digital image and how it ends up on screen.
The RAW file format has to be read by software and interpreted. Not all RAW converters are the same. For instance, Adobe ACR, RAWShooter, DPP, Capture One, and Aperture all interpret RAW files differently. They may add a color cast here, a sharpen there depending on the model. You have to mess with the white balance, either in camera or in post. Heck, just for OS X to ’see’ a RAW file, it has to redraw it for the screen. There’s no way not to change the ‘raw’ image. Not to mention what color profile gets assigned to it (if it happens) when it gets transferred from device to device. Then, when you print an image, how each press behaves completely differently is yet another factor that screws that notion up.
I’m not even going to bring up the fact that an image is not reality.
Just doesn’t happen.