Reuters limits digital-photo doctoring
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Reuters, stung by the discovery of a significantly manipulated photo of the bombing of Beirut last summer, has drawn the line between photo editing and photo doctoring.
Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger announced the move earlier this month. "We called together our senior photographers to strengthen our existing exacting guidelines on ethical issues in photography and wrote a new code of conduct for photographers," he said.
To deal with the situation, Reuters also severed its relationship with the freelance photographer who supplied two digitally altered photos, dismissed the editor supervising Middle East photo operations, and concluded after an investigation that "there was absolutely no intention on Reuters part to mislead the public."
Among the strictures of the Reuters technical guidelines, using Photoshop's cloning, healing and brush tools is forbidden, except to remove artifacts from dust on camera image sensors. Don't mess with color saturation or using the "auto levels" tool. Minimize use of color balance tools. The document even specifies precisely how much sharpening may be applied with the software's Unsharp Mask tool.
Doctoring photos predates digital photography by decades, but computer editing has taken the technology to a new level. Reuters established the policies in an effort to preserve readers' trust.