Reuters Photoshop Guidelines

[Richard_Coyle]

Here's a great blog that provides Photoshop editing guidelines for journalists associated with Reuters and would presumably be a good standard to judge other association submissions:

The use of Photoshop - Reuters Blogs

I'll post to Photoshop forum also.

[Dennis_Vied]

Jeez, how anal! It sounds like excessive micro-managing to me. I agree that one should not seek to mislead by the use of Photoshop, but to tell me how to finesse my final image is too anal for me. I don't think I could work for Reuters.

Now, tell me, are you guys so stupid that you can't handle it if they told you not to falsify your images? Of course not. You can do your normal processing, without falsifying your images, and without detailed instructions from some suit at Reuters. Am I right?

Just because some idiot editor ran a falsified image from the third world is no reason to assume all PJs are idiots.

How insulting!

[David_Buzzard]

News photographers are held to very high standards of journalistic integrety. When a reporter goes into the field, their writings can be shaded by their personal views. A photograph, on the other hand, is simply a unbiased view of what happened.

The problem with that is that several photographers have been caught enhancing, or removing distracting elements, out of the photos. REUTERS in particular, have been burned by this. It started when a REUTERS stringer during last summer's Lebanon war, put out a photo that had some extra smoke cloned into it. It was a very crude job, and somehow it got by the photo editor. The stringer was PNG'd, and the editor fired. As a result of this, bloggers on both sides of the issue (but mostly right wing types) started pouring over wire photos to see if anything else had been faked.

Although I'm a decade or more removed from the hard news business, I really think that still news photographers are being treated far too harshly in this whole thing. I remember during huricane Katrina, a TV reporter for one of the morning TV shows was doing a report from a canoe when two guys walked by her, showing that the water was a only a few inches deep. As far as I know, the reporter wasn't fired, or was anybody disiplined for that. As far as I'm concerned, that's so far past what any of these photographers have done, but everyone treated it like a big joke.

David Buzzard's Technical Blog

[DierkHaasis]

I actually find Reuter's guide lines very good. In essence they are saying: 'Don't do it yourself, get the raw photo to us and our graphic designers handle what we need.' Brilliant.

Just because we have learned to use image processing software to enhance or optimise our photos does not mean it is right - and I do not mean that in a moral sense. Photographers, specifically in the news business, should be taking photos, manipulation of any sort, including cropping, should be left to the ones lay-outing the paper or magazine.

Although it should be obvious that division of labour is a good thing most of the time, in the past 10 years ever more publishers have asked ever more of the photographers [and writers], leading to lay-offs in editorial and design departments. It also lead to ever more photographers doing ever more work for ever less money. It is not just individual photographers who are guilty of eroding ethics, they just do what they can to sell their pictures.

Who do you think was to blame for the publication of the manipulated image of burning Beirut [was it Beirut?], the photographer or the newspaper? In the end it was the owners of the newspaper, who understaffed their editorial department; either the editor was incompetent [in this specific case the manipulation was obvious even to those who have never heard of Photoshop] or there wasn't one.

[David_Buzzard]

I think in that case, I'd put the blame square on Reuters. They are using less career professionals in overseas assignments (by far the most profitable part of the wire service business is coverage of American and British sports), and are relying more on local stringers who have very little supervision. Editors can also be very demanding, I can just hear the editor asking if the photographer had any shots with more smoke in them, which probably started the guy down the road to tweeking the photo in the first place. Reuters, and most other wire services have centralized their editing, and cut the amount of editors working. That combined with a large volume of work coming from the area probably make for a 'perfect storm' in this case.

At the same time, every time something negative about Israel would go on the wire, there would be a chorus of, "those pictures are faked" from the right wing blogs. Keep in mind that the few pictures that were altered were enhanced, not fabricated. The photographer added extra smoke to smoke already rising over the city. The whole thing really got my blood up, as wire service stringers are some of the poorest paid guys in journalism, take by far the largest risks (they live in those communities, so they and their families are open to retaliation), and are far more effected by the conflicts than a foreign journalist who is dropping in for a few weeks.

David Buzzard's Technical Blog

[DierkHaasis]

Originally Posted by David_Buzzard

Keep in mind that the few pictures that were altered were enhanced, not fabricated.

Careful, the contents of the photo was really faked not just enhanced, quite different from the other prominent case, where some completely unnecessary [to the news] pair of legs were removed.

The Beirut photo originally showed one building heavily burning, the "enhancement" was not merely a selective colour/exposure value correction to let the dark grey smoke stand out black from the mushy background. The photographer cloned in smoke from one source to other buildings, giving the impression half of the city was on fire.

This manipulation, especially on a highly emotional subject, is not just enhancing, it is clearly falsifying*.



*All the worse that it was so obvious and badly done. It's one thing being played for a sucker, but they could at least try a little harder.

[Richard_Coyle]

Dennis
Evidently you don't have any first hand experience in this area. Putting emotional reactions aside, what the real world requires is integrity from one of the last bastions of public truth, journalistic new reporting. Most of the US still reads their local newspaper, relying on it for truth in reporting, and Reuters is a primary feed to many of these. Doing a shoot at the RCA Tennis Championships in Indy last summer for my hometown Indiana newspaper, I was instructed to forward the raw image directly to the news desk. No alteration of any kind. They took it from there. That's become the standard in many cases. Frankly, the Reuters rules are much more lenient than others, including my example. Journalistic integrity is much too critical to overlook in this difficult business environment for the news, and particularly the newspaper, industry, if they, and their reliable reporting, are to survive.