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Photoshop Allows Us To Alter Our Memories
Anti-Globalism writes "In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was. It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that, said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole. What were doing, Mr. Johnson said, is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking. And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriends family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo. Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there."
This is from the same school of "reality" as those cosmetics commercials where the model has had 6 hours of makeup and artificial eyelashes in order to look like that.
The more we force life to look perfect, the more we'll be disappointed by what we actually get. There is a great Charlie Brooker skit on aspirational television and how believing that we should be as beautiful and stylish as the cast of Friends and Sex and the City is actually making everybody miserable.
I would also say that the bumps of imperfection are an important part of our humanity. Examples:
- Over produced music sounds rubbish because if we can't hear the strumming it doesn't sound like a human being was playing it.
- If you cook Chilli from a recipe it may come out "perfect every time" but it will also get pretty dull.
- A sunny day is a much greater joy in Scotland, where it's a rarity.
Bah, humbug.
It's unlikely that you take photographs of every mundane aspect of your life. Some people do it, sure, but those aren't the pictures they want to put into photo albums, flash on their iPods, or hang on their walls. Selective history already plays a role in how we take and keep pictures, so this is just a natural progression of that: keep that photograph, but make it happier.
The Soviet Communists were experts at this. But in Soviet Russia, photos erase you!
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I've worked with old school reproduction work and retouching, as well as photo retouching and digital restoration of antique photos. Analogue manipulations just went digital, that's all there's to it.
Vanity always ruled. Even in real life we try to improve ourselves in order to please the senses: We wear makeup, fake "body" smells, garnments, footwear.. all to make a visual statement. *That's* the naked truth: We all cheat on reality. There's mankind for you.
Scan in an old sepia photo of your great-great-great grandmother, and study it in detail. Very often you'll find lines added: Eyelashes, "eyeliner", sometimes contours of nose and nails were enhanced in the darkroom, engraved modifications right onto the plate. Partly done to improve a poor shot, partly to enhance the subject. Coloring was also done, long before the first experiments with photographic color techniques were launched.
If "photoshopping" is somehow morally questionable, is black-and-white photography also questionable? It certainly doesn't reflect reality. But who ever said reflecting reality is the perogative of photography? All means of portrayal is artificial. Enter: Art.
Even a photo right out of the camera was and is tainted. Parameters are set for sharpness, contrast, hue and colors - be it by choise of analogue film and development etc. - or by digital options - basically mimicking the features of analogue cameras and traditional darkroom processes.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
"Reality" isn't necessarily what is directly recorded by a camera.
Retouching is only part of the issue. I spent years adjusting color in photographs of fine arts by increments as small as .005 stop, because film doesn't record most colors accurately. One must make decisions about what colors in a painting are important, and balance that with the overall impression in the photograph. Gold may be sacrificed for green, etc. This is necessary to make the image appear as "real" as possible, but much of that is subjective, and a lot of decisions have to be made in consultation with the artist.
I also spent a lot of time retouching prints to put back edges that disappeared from overexposure, fill in white spots left by grain or dust, etc. Again, this was necessary to restore "reality" to the image.
There are plenty of other techniques I used in traditional printing that distort the process in order to represent "reality" better—tilting the easel, altering contrast, burning/dodging with cardboard cutouts and colored filters, rubbing the print in the developer solution, et al.
A photograph is a flat, bandlimited model of something. It only represents a tiny fraction of the information that is there, and which fraction is the purview of the photographer. There is no simple, objective process that makes "real" photographs because reality is subjective. The reality in a photograph always depends on the photographer's intent, and no technique is "evil" if it serves that intent.
Nikon has Image Authentication software that can detect whether an image has been processed or altered after having been taken. I would expect to see this used in cases where digital photographs are used as evidence in a trial.
The only problem is that Polaroid is abandoning the kind if camera it is famous for. They're willing to license the technology to other companies, however, so it's not necessarily over.
News article from the NY Times here:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/polaroid-abandons-instant-photography/
You might not be able to tell, but a mathematician probably can.
Basically the idea is that if you open up a JPG, and then save it, the overall quality of the image deteriorates in a non-linear fashion with repeated saves. So, if you resave the image at 95% quality, and introduce a known error, then compare that against the original, the deterioration in quality should be homogeneous throughout the image. If not, the image is a composition from multiple sources. Check out slides 42 and 43 in the linked PDF file.
You can get around this, but you need to be VERY careful. Ideally you'd want to start out with raw images, and do all your manipulation saves/loads in some lossless format. Any kind of painting or blending in the image would have to be done carefully, as well, as it would be easy to produce a region of superior quality pixels that would show up in this kind of analysis.