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Reuters Bans RAW Photo Format (petapixel.com)
grcumb writes: Reuters is the latest agency to join the ranks of the technically clueless who think that ethical problems can be solved using technical means. They recently issued a circular to their contributors, stating in part: "In future, please don't send photos to Reuters that were processed from RAW or CR2 files. If you want to shoot raw images that's fine, just take JPEGs at the same time. Only send us the photos that were originally JPEGs, with minimal processing...." The problem they claim to be addressing is doctored images, but they don't explain how they plan to ensure that the JPEGs weren't simply exported from RAW files with their EXIF data altered, or heck, just altered as JPEG. They also assert that getting JPEG files straight from the camera is quicker, which is fair enough. Lots of professionals shoot with RAW+JPEG at newsworthy events. They can send the JPEGs off quickly to meet the first deadline, then process the RAW files at leisure for higher quality publications.
A lot of executive decisions boil down to demands to solve a problem (e.g. photos may be doctored) and an executive deciding he has to "do something", else when it does blow up he did NOT do "something". For example, if an unknown terrorist might strike, it doesn't matter whether the action (ban refugees at a state level) actually matters, it's insurance that when something did happen that you demonstrated precaution. CYA
Gently reply
Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, so apporters should be using APP files, not LUDDITE JPEG files!
Apps!
Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image?
As a former photojournalist, I can saw that you simply blacklist them and/or fire them from being a contributor/stringer/staffer at that image bureau. There are ethical standards in the professional photography world, and it is nothing bad to those of us who upheld our high ethical standards to see someone get fired for unethically altering images and cheating and breaking the rules. I doubt this is as much a problem from a "who altered their photos?" problem as it is the photographers are submitting larger files (even if lossy down converted into JPG from RAW) and Reuters is having problems handling so many large files in their infrastructure and pushing photos out in distribution to their newsroom client "on the wire" servers. I know in my past when dealing with AP, if you uploaded a file that was too large they either rejected it, or WORSE, applied their lossy compression using whatever software they saw fit. When what your image looks like is everything to a shooter, and when a perfect images is ruined by crap third party compression due to file size, the lesson is hard learned and PJ folks are pretty savvy getting the best bang per MB.
The main reason to shoot in raw is to take advantage of the larger sensor dynamic range so you can adjust exposure and color balance without harming image quality. I don't see every photojournalist suddenly asking people to hold still while they adjust their camera.
Bet you anything they've a managed workflow system and their solution can't deal with raw files.
Not surprising since each camera and sensor can have a different format that needs to be accounted for. Supporting raw natively would mean having to effectively deal with hundreds of different image formats, with new ones introduced with each camera model. They probably don't want to pay to support that.
One method of identifying modified images is to glean information from how the jpeg encoder constructed the file. It leaves a sort of fingerprint and it gets modified if an image is modified or re-encoded.
Of course a RAW file is a dump from an image sensor and that is NOT the same thing as an uncompressed planar bitmap as many assume. It's more of a signal and contains much information that is thrown away when creating something a human eye can intemperate (Processing). In fact, I think it would be harder to doctor a RAW format because all image sensors have random imperfections, their own physical "fingerprint" that can be traced back to a specific camera. (These imperfections are fixed in processing. All serious cameras have a built-in imperfection reference map created during manufacture and testing. More serious cameras let you update this manually too) Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.
They're not trying to prevent "doctored" images.
The original memo reads:
I’d like to pass on a note of request to our freelance contributors due to a worldwide policy change.. In future, please don’t send photos to Reuters that were processed from RAW or CR2 files. If you want to shoot raw images that’s fine, just take JPEGs at the same time. Only send us the photos that were originally JPEGs, with minimal processing (cropping, correcting levels, etc).
And a follow-up quote reads
While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news. [...] Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.
Which doesn't mean they're trying to prevent people from faking photos; as that line is clearly referring to the "minimal editing" part of the above guidelines, and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.
>Reuters is the latest agency to join the ranks of the technically clueless who think that ethical problems can be solved using technical means.
Huh? Many ethical problems CAN be solved by technical means, just not this one.
Reuters doesnt want to have to dig so deep to discover manipulated photos. They dont want it to be quite so easy to manipulate those photos without it being easily discoverable. Its an entirely separate issue from having punishment for misdeeds. Ars has no issue with it.
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
There are already so many parameters that a photograph can use to tell their own story (framing, focal length, depth of field, ...) that a few touches such as correcting white balance or exposure would pale in comparison. In fact these touches can be used to make the picture actually more faithful, by removing camera artefacts.
There is a good example somewhere where people complained against advertisers and as evidence submitted a picture taken with telephoto lens, making their city look cluttered with billboards. Advertisers responded by taking a picture of the same area but this time with a wide angle lens, for a totally different effect.
As for the speed of processing, good photographers can do basic editing on a RAW in a couple of minutes.
If Reuters no longer accepts images in a particular format, it's their business.
Exactly. So send them JPEGs and STFU.
I am pretty sure the real issue is file size and standards, not doctoring. As manufacturers keep ridiculously upping sensor MP size, photo sizes continue to balloon to larger and larger sizes. RAW files are notoriously huge and non-standard. The extra processing they are referring to is probably just the need to convert those various RAW files back to JPEG, which takes/wastes time/energy by their staff.
You would have to be a pretty big idiot to think that JPEG files are harder to doctor than RAW files. Any photo format can be used when exporting a doctored image... has nothing to do with how it is saved.
They probably profiled people and found that senders of RAW were more likely to be doctored. Also, having an uncompressed image makes it easier to doctor files later.
Yes, would-be fakers can work around this by sending in JPEG format with no compression (I think), and doctoring then sending; but it's not as stupid as the summary makes it out to be.
First shot fired. Now it's a little less convenient for fakers.
Bet you anything they've a managed workflow system and their solution can't deal with raw files.
It's actually worse than that: they aren't merely saying, "Don't send us raw files" (Note no caps -- "raw" isn't an abbreviation); they're saying "Don't send us anything that was even *processed* from raw files." It's as if the raw processing algorithms in the camera are somehow sacrosanct, but the equivalent algorithms run in Lightroom is suspect.
In fact, I think it would be harder to doctor a RAW format because all image sensors have random imperfections, their own physical "fingerprint" that can be traced back to a specific camera. (These imperfections are fixed in processing. All serious cameras have a built-in imperfection reference map created during manufacture and testing. More serious cameras let you update this manually too) Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.
I'm not sure what you're talking about by "imperfection reference map" -- do you mean dust delete data? That isn't built-in; you need to take a reference photo of something white in order to generate that. Some software processors also have hot/dead pixel detection.
Otherwise, there is definitely nothing in serious cameras (I assuming that the Canons and Nikons that the vast majority of photojournalists journalists use are "serious") that has any sort of built-in calibration for random imperfections in the sensor. While I have no doubt that, given enough samples and enough time, you might be able to find a way to "fingerprint" a camera, in most cases, sensor noise (whether photon-shot noise, readout noise, or others) is going to significantly overpower any sort of unique characteristics.
Most cameras will let you shoot both Raw & jpg at the same time. Some pro cameras even have dual memory cards which will allow you to store raw on one ( preferably the bigger / faster one ) and jpg on the other. Grab your shot, submit it quickly via .jpg and use your raw file to impress folks with your post production skills later on :D
The format requirement change really only does two things:
1) It cuts down storage requirements significantly. Full size 14-bit Raw image on my Nikon D4s is almost 20MB. Full size .jpg at the fine setting is 8MB.
( The D4s only has a 16mp sensor. Crank that up a bit and the file sizes get rather ludicrous. )
2) Separates the pros from the amateurs. A pro knows how to get a good shot without resorting to post to fix things they should have got right in the camera.
( like exposure and white balance )
Most professional cameras produce perfectly good JPEGs straight out of the camera and give you a fairly accurate representation of what was actually there, as long as the photographer pays some attention to the camera settings. That's what Reuters wants. The problem with post-processed RAW files is that it's incredibly easy and tempting to get carried away from simple noise reduction and exposure corrections into dramatically modifying the look and even content of the image for a more artistic and interesting look. That's not what Reuters wants. Reuters is a news agency, not a photo journal.
"[H]igher quality publications"... That would rule out Reuters. Granted, they're not the AP, but still...
Make them think it was doctored by a child.
They have no idea how real photography works. JPG is a 'final' format. You capture an image on an SLR as RAW so you get all of the information the sensor can give you, and then you process it to pull the JPGs you want to give to the user of your shots. In journalism, many photographs are taken under marginal conditions, such as four stops below optimum in a sandstorm. Shooting RAW gives you the most latitude to recover usable images that might give us the ability to identify a terrorist. You can apply high dynamic range processing to a single RAW frame to show detail not recoverable any other way, and given a bracket of five RAW frames one stop apart, even handheld, you can postprocess them into a great picture.
Yes, today's journalism photography is being done with many devices that shoot JPG as their native mode, and as any photographer will tell you, the best camera in the world is the one you have with you. But anyone who prohibits high-detail RAW imagery is a person who does not deserve to be in journalism. Manufacturers have responded to the phone-photography challenge with formats like Micro Four Thirds, which gives you SLR versatility in a compact body and lens format that you can take to wherever the news is being made.
Keep the RAW files to yourselves. They're like having the negatives. That keeps you in control of your images.
Reuters doesn't want the hassle of dealing with RAW files. They're huge. The formats are many. They also require extra handling. They also don't need them for their uses.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
They want a JPG so that they can get it up on the website and social media sites as fast as possible. It pays for them to be the first to get a picture or story out. They don't want a photographer to spend the time converting the image on their computer.
But what is perfectly fine is to shoot in RAW + JPG and send in the JPG right away. Then after the event the photographer would take the best shot or two and do the minimal amount of adjustments allowed to make the image more appropriate for newspapers or magazines.
I thought RAW was the raw, unmodified data from the hardware. If so then any JPEG file from it has to have been processed either by the camera's computer or a separate machine. Either way manipulation can occur so thats a non-starter. As far as peed is concerned it may have to do with bandwidth. Transmitting a JPEG would happen a bit faster per picture. How many pictures / videos does Reuters process in a day? I'll bet its bigger than "a bunch". If so then using JPEG could seriously affect how much they transmit per hour.
Better is one of those terms where "at what" should always be attached.
The whole purpose of shooting raw images is to do advanced processing later. However, any such processing involves creative choice which alters the image to the taste of the person doing the processing. It's easy to alter the white point and have some journalistically important details lost in the shadows.
Also in a high stakes case suspected forgery, it may be possible to detect forged images by looking at minute noise and encoding choices made by a particular camera model. Faking these details well enough to fool the experts would be beyond the expertise of most would-be forgers.
Of course, Reuters could ask for RAW files themselves and have even more fidelity/authentication potential. But those files are huge, many journalists do not have a fast internet connection where they work, and the publisher would need expertise on RAW workflows.
All in all, I think it's a reasonable decision and will be successful against unintentional/unconscious alterations and causual forgery.
Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.
Well that settles it. I like my knowledge to be lustful and spry. Inanimate knowledge just isn't the same.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
They should require videos to use the GIF format.
There's no such thing as original jpeg, the RAW data is the actual sensor data that goes into the camera. When shooting as jpeg the camera takes the RAW image, then converts it to jpeg before saving.
They want your metadata, so that they can track you.
True black and white pictures. 12800 ISO, grain out the ass. Smelly chemicals. Annoyingly slow scanning that takes 2 minutes per frame out of your life.
Go film.
... that Reuters accepts only Polaroids or other instant cameras. Nice!
Do I look like I know what a JPEG is?
Compression of RAW to JPEG and the alteration of JPEG images leaves a distinct signature in it's Error Level Analysis results. Using a simple utility like http://www.impulseadventure.co... to automatically prescreen images would relieve a huge burden from their shoulders. For authenticity, requesting the RAW after the JPEG to see if the compression gradients are uniform would work as a nice level of security as well.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
If Reuters didn't accept images from Muslim journalists, they wouldn't have this problem.
I suspect that you misremember or that the one who told you this was lying. At least, I can't find any information that confirms this. To the contrary, this book uses the Vietnam war as evidence for the importance of treatment for survival.
https://books.google.nl/books?...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
It is much easier to pass off forgeries in uncompressed formats.
If they were to shoot in an uncompressed format anyway and save using a common image manipulation program, you can extract the quantization table and use it to detect forgeries using commonly available tools, even if the journalist thinks it is clever and modifies the EXIF data.
One way to produce a forgery would be to shoot in raw, manipulate your photo, and then modify the EXIF data to match a genuine jpeg file's and also make sure that the image is compressed using the same quantization matrix that the camera uses. This is probably "technically advanced" to most journalists. Of course, to be foolproof, you shouldn't let the adversary obtain more than a few images taken with the same camera (or they could use sensor noise to identify the forgery) or copy-paste areas from the same image, which can also be detected.
References
- http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/jpeg-quantization.html
- Estimation of Primary Quantization Matrix in Double Compressed JPEG Images, with J. Lukas, Proc. of DFRWS 2003, Cleveland, OH, USA, August 5-8 2003.
http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/Doublecompression.pdf
It's only about two things:
1. RAW formats contain "salt" checksums, algorithm is not known, so you cannot really fake it no matter how did you try, in fact, manufacturer can add one to JPEG's too, but they aren't doing it
2. RAW is MUCH larger than JPEG, probably, JPEG's are enough for them
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
If Reuters didn't accept images from Cuntservative/Losertarian journalists, they wouldn't have this problem.
So they want pictures with no way to prove their "real." A RAW file is the data directly from the camera's sensor. It would be more difficult for the average reporter to alter a RAW file than a JPEG. A JPEG accompanied by the RAW file would show that the JPEG is an accurate representation of the picture that was actually taken.
I wish there was some kind of law that prevented people from making rules concerning things about which they are ignorant.
Reuters might not be clueless at all. The camera-provided JPEGs might be watermarked, and they might believe this watermarking is a stronger proof that the photo was not edited for content than the assurance and reputation of the photographer/source.
If images are required to be JPG straight from the camera, and they expect further levels editing work, then that means the post-processing will be decoding and then re-encoding the image. That's like photocopying a photocopy in terms of image quality. Not to mention that this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how cameras and file formats work in the first place.
Wait until someone tells them that every single JPEG from every single camera was, at one time, uncompressed raw data from the image sensor.
I cannot fathom any explanation as to why they press so hard on presenting photos and video as is, but feel free to be as creative as possible with the text and words. My guess is that cameramen are considered second class citizens as opposed to the anchors, and they actively want to prevent them from doing anything creative.
This does not make much sense at all. It is common practice to improve the look of images both for press and web and while not actually causing any kind of misrepresentation the image is still altered from the original. An underexposed image can very simply be improved by adjusting brightness and contrast levels. Images with improper color balance due to poor lighting or other reasons can easily be corrected using curves and levels. The issue is one of responsibility and knowing how far to go before the image is effectively doctored and pushing some sort of agenda. jpegs can be altered just as easily as RAW, tif, png, psd etc.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Umm... what gave you that idea? There are -lots- of ways to edit jpg's and most other image formats.
That said, police photographers have a protocol for ensuring that original images are digitally signed as they leave the camera (I don't know the details) so that they can be trusted in court as evidence.
Was supposed to be a joke, didn't work I guess.
Just doesn't work on the "Sheldon"s: those that do not understand the concept of sarcasm...