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Virtual School. Information Technology. Photo retouching - improving or misleading? |
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Links Teacher / parent notes IT in context |
Photo retouching - improving or misleading?
Retouching a photograph is now easy, so easy that it may be done thoughtlessly. It may also be done deliberately to deceive. It can be done so the changes are invisible to the viewer so they can be deceived. We should all be wary of the way the media, (especially advertising) and in some countries the government, can manipulate us by changing the truth. The idea that the camera never lies is certainly no longer true - but where do we draw the line between acceptable cleaning up and unacceptable manipulation of the facts? There is not an easy answer to this moral dilemma. Try it yourself by deciding whether to leave or retouch in each of these examples of photographs: ° remove a spot from an old picture ° remove a spot on a person's face ° remove a stain on an old picture ° remove a stain on a person's shirt ° remove a hair blown across a person's face ° add hair to a person with a receding hairline ° whiten the teeth of a model ° for a background character - change a frown to a smile ° for a main character - change a frown to a smile ° remove a person walking across in the background ° remove a person half hidden to the side of the main character ° remove a person sitting between the two main characters ° remove a space between two characters to bring them closer together Perhaps it is not so simple to decide .... If you have access to an application which can retouch photographs (Adobe Photoshop is the best known example but other versions frequently come with scanners) you could experiment with changing photographs which you have scanned in. If you have old sepia family photographs you could clean them up and remove blemishes without altering the original, then copy them and send them to other members of the family. Make individual portraits from a group photograph. Add a photograph of one person who is missing from a team photograph. Combine pictures of separate friends and family members so Great grandma is in the same photograph as her great grandchild. Place photographs of yourself or your pet in unlikely places - against a scanned background of a desert or mountaintop or peering from the window of a space capsule....
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