Scientific Publication Condemns Photo-Manipulation

valdean writes "According to a recent article in the New York Times (registration and short biography required) scientific journals have begun to respond to a growing problem of photo-manipulation in submitted manuscripts. At The Journal of Cell Biology, a test developed in 2002 revealed that 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts had one or more illustrations that were manipulated to the point of violating the journal's guidelines. Examples included the duplication of images for re-presentation as a control experiment, making pictures prettier with the clone stamp tool, use of the contrast tool to hide data, and merging portions of several images so that they appear to be a single image. How were many of these scientists caught? They submitted layered Adobe Photoshop files that showed exactly what they had done."

Comments

I don't see what the big deal is.

[eclectro]

Photoshopping germs to look better for journals couldn't be any worse than photoshopping models to look better for magazine covers.

Glad this came up

[smooth wombat]

Not because it exposed people who were fast and loose with their photos but because it brings up the whole issue of digital photo manipulation for entries. I recently submitted two photos for a local photo contest which were done from film.

When it came time to see the submitted photos I took my parents along so they could see how my prints stacked up to the others.

Of the roughly 30 prints that were submitted there were at least two I was sure had been manipulated and possibly one more. The one case was blatant. The submitter had done a poor cut and paste of a wood duck. The other was the merging of two photos which produced a very nice looking picture.

As more and more people use digital cameras and then PhotoShop (or other programs) the 'art' of photography goes away since the original photo can so easily be manipulated. Unlike in traditional photography where the negative or slide is the original and any manipulation of that original can be easily seen.

Personally I would like to see photo contests have two separate categories. One for film cameras and one for digital with the understanding that the digital photo may have been manipulated in a way beyond what traditional photos can be. Like the article I'm not talking about enhancing contrast since that can be done with different paper or chemical process for film photos but rather the addition or subtraction of wholesale items.

Yes, adding and removing objects from a film photo can be done but it is more labor-intensive and harder to pull off than with a photo manipulation program.

Granted, if people would just be honest about what they submit we wouldn't have to have this discussion but the same could be said about laws or notices to not do something.

Re:Glad this came up

[smooth wombat]

Just because manufacturers no longer make film cameras (well, most don't) doesn't mean that film won't still be used.

Olympus hasn't made a film camera in roughly a decade but myself and others still use them.

Maybe in the distant future, something like 200 years, film cameras will no longer be used but for the forseeable future film will still be with us. Not to mention slides which give better color saturation than any film can.

Re:Glad this came up

[drinkypoo]

I suspect that black and white will hang around for a long time because it's pretty inexpensive stuff. Color, on the other hand, is on the way out. It's not that there's no reason to use color film - you still can't get the resolution out of any CCD that you can get out of large-format film. But, that will change!

Now, IANAP(hotographer) and the furthest I ever got with it was one B&W class at a community college, but it seems to me that the color quality is actually a secondary issue. It's well-known that in order to make a good print, you have to fuck around with color anyway. Why not do that digitally, these days?

Re:Allowed Image Manipulations

[psgalbraith]

On the other hand, if a researcher changes the contrast of the whole image to make it easier to see the patterns they are drawing their conclusions from, then they can always claim they really didn't notice the other stuff. Essentially, researchers have to avoid doing things that prove that they were deliberately dishonest.

Don't discount the possibility that there was nothing else interesting to see either. Scientists are not all dishonest!

Disclaimer: I am a scientist.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a photographer more than I am a scientist. To what degree would the digital darkroom techniques that I routinely practice be considered fraudulent by scientific journals?

1. Use of a little unsharp masking: this is the digital equivalent of tweaking the focus of the enlarger in a chemical darkroom-- a practice that I believe was very common in the days of chemical microphotography
2. Use of the histogram controls and gamma adjustments: the digital equivalent of choosing films, papers, chemistries, and processing times and temperatures to expand or compress the tones, or shift the tonal balance of the final print (except with digital photography, we can now do this kind of stuff after the image is acquired rather than guessing beforehand)
3. Use of hue and saturation controls: the digital equivalent of choosing films, papers, and filters with different color sensitivities
4. Use of different kinds of noise suppression: in some respects, similar to controlling the grain of chemical images, but also needed to manage artifact specific to digital cameras

I end up using all the above to some degree in almost every good photograph I take. I don't think these distort the veracity of my photos, but they do leave some artifact in the images.

And there are other things I will do that will leave a lot of artifact without distorting the basic truth of the images: fading and blurring background or foreground detail that is distracting; using masks and filters to bring out detail lost in shadows or highlights; removing a piece of spinach from the front tooth of my subject's wide smile; removing red eye.

How many of these techniques that I see as valuable in paring away unimportant detail is the scientific community going to regard as falsifying the imagery? How is an image that has been manipulated to more clearly show significant detail going to be distinguished from an image that is intended to show false detail?

Old News

[Arandir]

New news in the scientific community, but very old news in the news community. You can never believe any picture you see in the news media. Here's a recent example: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003780.htm . The media (both big and small) have been repeated caught photoshopping their images. One of the great advantages of the blogosphere is that this sort of stuff gets found out very quickly.

Re:Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

That "auto-levels" tool was only applied to the eyes.

First off, let me say that I am *not* the above Anonymous Coward.

Secondly let me say that while the "auto-levels" tool was only applied to the eyes, that was not all that was done. Simple application of the "auto-levels" tool to the eyes alone (as selected by the lasso tool will not repeat will not create the "demon Condi" effect.

Working with a 450x384 source image (which BTW scales down exactly to the 180x142 pixels of the "demon Condi" image when the Contrain Proportions checkbox is selected) and selecting the eyes with the lasso tool and applying the "auto-levels" adjustment and scaling the image down to the same 180x142 pixels of the published "demon Condi" image results in what is an acceptable image without the "demon" eyes.

In order to create the "demon Condi" effect one must do a very slight pixel edit to the eyes of the 180x142 image. Use the eye dropper to pick up the brightest pixels remaining in the whites of the eyes and then use the pencil tool to lighten a couple of pixels adjacent to the sides of the lower half of the irises. This creates the "demon" eye effect.

Back when this originally occurred I was fairly certain that the image had been deliberately manipulated to create this effect. Attempting to replicate the effect in Photoshop myself and finding that USA Todays' stated reason for the effect does not create the effect by itself without further pixel manipulation (however minor it may have been) reinforces my belief that this was done deliberately by the photoeditor, even though it may have been done without the knowledge (and thus without the approval) of the USA Todays' editors.