A Little News

If you have paid any attention at all over the past few years you will be aware that photographic ethics have become a huge issue. Photographers of some renown have lost jobs for Photoshopping images to make them look like what they wanted rather than what they actually saw and shot. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The part most people don’t see comprise the greater part of photographic ethics.

Let’s just start with what is and is not appropriate for a photojournalist to do with Photoshop or your image editing software of choice. The first step in any discussion of visual ethics must be the determination that you will not do anything beyond what is needed to make the photo look in print as much like what you saw in your viewfinder as is possible. That means whatever tool you use from a traditional darkroom to a computer program must be done with the end result being accuracy.

The most important part of that opening statement is this. I may do some things at my paper to prepare an image for print that are peculiar to the requirements of my paper’s printing plant. You may not need to do some of those things. I do them and I will show you what I do and why it is needed at The Decatur Daily. Some of you guys may work for papers where the prepress work is done by an imaging technician. We don’t have those at The Daily. Photographers are the imaging techs so bear that in mind as we go forward.

Almost all of my Nikon camera images require some degree of manipulation in Photoshop and it is a fairly rare image that doesn’t require the use of the history brush tool. That is my most common PS tool. I use it all the time to add contrast in shadow areas. Our press tends to run very flat and very blue so I have to tone accordingly. That includes really working the shadows and mid-tones. This is not as much a problem shooting with my personal Canon because Canon tends to do more in-camera processing than Nikon. For those not familiar with history brush, I use it essentially like a dodge and burn tool. It is just more accurate and easier to use.

I begin with a baseline toning of the entire image. Then in the history section of the pallette I create two snapshots. I do the toning on the first snapshot that I want to do for a particular area of the picture then click on the history brush and “paint” in the area I toned up or down. You can go on doing this as long as needed. Each new snapshot uses the last snapshot you worked as the baseline to build from. I usually don’t do more than two sets of snapshots and about ninety percent of the time I only do one set.

There have been some unfortunate uses of Photoshop that have resulted in some prominent photographers being fired over the last couple of years and it has become fairly routine for images coming out of governments that control their media to Photoshop images to meet their propaganda needs. The Iranians just did this to cover a botched missile test launch. One of four failed to launch so they simply cloned one of the others over the failed launch vehicle. I am not naming names of the photojournalists who have been caught because most of them have been adequately roasted already. Here is a summary of some of the ethics pits they fell in. One guy cloned out a person’s legs in a photo, another combined two photos (from a war image) to make it more dramatic and another lost his job for violating a specific policy regarding over saturating/toning photos. All three were failings, not of Photoshop, but of personal ethics.

When you leave home every day, and this is not just about photojournalism, you make sure you put on your ethics just the same as you put on your clothes. You end up naked if you omit either of them.

This is exactly what the Nikon NEF looks like. (Click on the smaller images to see a larger version) In the first screen snapshot you can see I create two snapshots of the raw image. I click on the first snapshot and tone the image not worrying about what the clouds are doing. I am toning to bring the values up in the lower third of the frame where the cyclists are. I then use the history brush tool to “paint” in the new values. This is just like dodging used to be in the darkroom for you old timers. Dodging was, wait, the darkroom was, oh, just forget about it and I don’t want to hear about how old I am either. Darn pups! Next I create two more snapshots. It is important to remember that the last snapshot I worked in needs to be the one highlighted before I create these next snapshots because I want them to based off the work I have just done. Now, in the new snapshot which will be the third overall, I will retone the image to get the clouds to look like I want them to then I will click in the fourth snapshot and “paint” in the clouds using the history brush tool. When I am satisfied that I have the image that will reproduce I just save the image and I am ready to caption, proof and print the image. Some of you will notice that this image is a bit over toned and it is. As David Hobby at Strobist likes to say, we in the newspaper industry are printing our photos on toilet paper. This means I have to hype my tones and exaggerate the values just a bit to make up for the loss of contrast and saturation in this medium. My goal is to get an image press ready that will replicate what I saw as closely as I can get it. Clouds are particularly tough because their tonal range is short and generally dark so I have worked these clouds more than you would if you were just making an 8×10 for the wall. That short, dark tonal range is really tough on our printing press. Like I said earlier, some of the things I do are a bit exaggerated because of the age of our printing press and because of its color reproduction tendencies. That said, the history brush is a wonderful tool to use for dodging and burning and it is much more accurate and easy to use than the dodge and burn tools themselves. No matter what tool you use just remember to use it ethically. Of course, if you are a reader who is not bound by the ethical standards of photojournalism and are just creating work for yourself, have a blast. The rest of us like to eat so we will mind the ethics shop.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.