An example of photoshop manipulation. Can you spot the difference? Photo illustration by Caitlin McCarrick / Assistant Photo Editor

Huge zit in your graduation photos? Dark circles under your eyes in your wedding shoot?  Aunt Susie was in the restroom when the family photo was taken? There is one easy solution to all these photo mishaps: Photoshop—both a noun and a verb frequently used and heard these days.

A few clicks here and your zit is history. A few more clicks and your eyes are bright, and Aunt Susie’s in the group shot now. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to alter and manipulate images. Well, perfectly acceptable in most situations.

People have lost their jobs, credibility, and have essentially been blacklisted for using Adobe Photoshop or similar image-editing software. Why such a serious crime? Well for photojournalistic images (which are an attempt to portray a scene or situation as close to reality as possible), altering an image is dishonest and unethical.

Photographs used for news must live up to strict ethical standards. The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Code of Ethics offers codes of ethics with nine important ideals that journalists should lock up in their memory banks. Number six explains that “Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects” (nppa.org).

What does this mean? It means if there’s a telephone pole in the background that looks like it’s sticking out of a person’s head in the photo, it has to stay there. If the president has bad skin that day, altering it in any way to make it look like he just got a facial is completely unacceptable. If the color of his or her shirt would look much better against that background if it were black, it still must stay white.

In 2003, Brian Walski, staff photographer for the New York Times, was fired for manipulating his image to create a scene from the war in Iraq that never really took place.  In 2007, Allan Detrich, a former Pulitzer Prize finalist and staff photographer for The Toledo Blade, was suspended, and then later resigned for digitally altering several of his images.

More recently, in 2010, a prize-winning photo was disqualified from a World Press Photo contest because the photographer, in post editing, removed a small portion of a foot in the background, altering the original photo.
Sadly, these are but a small fraction of the incidences where ethical standards were violated. Here at the Sundial, adhering to these journalistic standards is serious business.

So just how much can we alter photos? When exactly does it become an ethics violation? It’s a fine line, but without these strict standards, there can be no trust between the viewer and the photojournalist. Different news organizations have their own standards, but generally, basic darkroom techniques are allowed, such as cropping an image or darkening, lightening, brightening or sharpening an image to make it look closest to how the scene really appeared. Editors can ask themselves, why am I editing this photo? Is it for technical reasons, or is it to alter the image to make it appear more interesting?

Digital manipulation can serve many purposes at the right time and place.  There are even Web sites, such as worth1000.com, that hold contests where the best Photoshopped images win. Or perhaps you will want to use your Photoshop skills to prove to your friends that you saw Bigfoot on your vacation—but in photojournalism, there is zero tolerance for such tampering.

Unsigned editorials represent the majority view of the Sundial editorial board and are not necessarily those of the journalism department. Other views on the opinion page are those of the individual writer.