Digital Editing: A New Era of Media
Pot marks on are removed from a models face. Your mother appears in a dominatrix outfit. The Egyptian pyramids are moved closer together. An actors teeth are straightened. A mug-shot is darkened after an arrest. An LA Times photographer is fired for altering pictures in Iraq. Composite photographs are created for huge advertising efforts. Eye color is changed, hair and facial highlights are added, bodies adjusted and fat removed.
What do all these facts have in common? They are all products of the ability, temptation and allure of digital manipulation. Startling examples such as these reflect the recent explosion in technology capable of digitally manipulating photographs. While magazines, major newspapers, advertising agencies, and other companies have altered photography for the last two decades, in this past decade, there has been a large-scale introduction of digital photo software into the consumer market. In a sense, digital manipulation has been made more democratic.
With one of these new programs, a scanner and the internet, photos can be altered easily and efficiently to produce a desired result. The relatively simple process revolves around picture elements known as pixels. A pixel, at its very core, is simply a square dot of color on a computer screen or a television.
Scanners break down photographs into pixels and digital cameras simply record the image it receives just as a normal camera does but uses a digital file with a large number of colored pixels instead of light exposure on plastic film. The greater the number of pixels an image has, the greater to detail of the digital picture. Once the photo has been transformed into a large collection of pixels, the person using the program can manipulate the pixels in a variety of ways: colors can be changed, brightness added, objects attached and removed, contrast corrected, picture quality and integrity restored. In essence, the user can actually create an almost completely new "perfect" image. Naturally, the public's reaction to this technology has created an intense controversy.
The debate centers primarily on two groups. Anti-manipulation advocates are those who believe photographs should always represent the truth. A photograph's first and foremost function is to portray reality, they assert. Many assume that pictures have never been manipulated, and that this recent outbreak in digital technology damages the integrity of photography. Without delay, anti-manipulation proponents demand an end to all "untruthful" photography, as it severely misleads the public. Also, they view digital manipulation as a purely mechanical process, with no talent or skill involved.
Anti-manipulation proponents also attempt to reasonably forecast a bleak situation in which manipulated photos can acquit a murderer or rapist in courts of law. Not all anti-manipulation supporters are so radical however.
More mild proponents believe manipulation has a less detrimental effect in the context of fiction, where the reader understands that the image is not necessarily a fact. But regarding non-fiction, they also believe that when a manipulated photo appears with a factual account, readers may be left with an incorrect impression. The greater majority newspaper editors, who feel their job is to convey accurate reflections of reality and society within the media they produce, are intolerant of digital manipulation. The Associated Press - the biggest supplier of news photos around the world - hold a traditional, purist, stance on the issue; they are against manipulation. The AP has written a code of ethics to assure customer newspapers that the pictures it provides are only altered to improve image quality. It states that "the content of a photograph will NEVER be changed or manipulated in any way." In addition, the AP also urges customer newspapers not to manipulate in seemingly harmful ways.
Pro-manipulation advocates believe, however, that photographs are an art form and thus fair game for creative adjustments. They object to any restrictions on digital manipulation, and fervently support the new technology. Their main argument is that no artistic medium has gone unchanged, including photography, and that these changes are very beneficial. They view the digital manipulation of photography as using mechanical techniques to attain an artistic end. Some believe that using different photos and melding them together electronically to create a single image is a form of art, and a highly lucrative form at that.
In response to the anti-manipulation claims that photographs should always tell the truth, pro-manipulation supporters reply that pictures have never told the complete truth. A camera shows - as it always has - a fraction of reality, out of context. There is nothing inherent about a picture that provides anything about the culture or time period in which it was taken, who the picture was taken by, if it actually reflects that reality of tie situation appropriately, if it's been framed or cropped in a biased way, or what happened before and after the picture. Photographs are merely a still picture of what our eyes see in real time. Reality is around us, it's what we see and feel, it's live motion, a picture will never truly capture that unless it's in succession with a list of other pictures, also known as video. The standard rules and ethics of digital manipulation are partly based on the cliché ideal that pictures in themselves do not lie, yet photography has rarely been considered as absolute truth.
At the same time, photography, in a general sense, is an art form, and therefore rightfully susceptible to creative alterations. With the recent success and advancement of digital manipulation technology, the movement can not be stopped. Digital capability clearly exists on a grand-scale, and will most likely not disappear for the rest of mankind's days.
The cost, effect and usage of digital editing are increasing daily. Today's society is a one based a vast amount of digital technology. It's in our computers, our TVs, all of our electronics; it's in our cameras and pictures, it's in our CDs and mp3's, it's in our cars, our movies, our favorite television shows, our videogames; it's in our jobs, it's in our life. With the advent of many consumer oriented computers, programs and electronics, digital editing is daily becoming more readily available for the standard user.
Consumers now have ability and access to do the things that only professionals once could achieve. We can create our own songs with audio editing software, we can take our own pictures and edit them with photography software, and we can film our own video and add special effects, edit the film and display it for others. Everything these days doesn't take a multimillion dollar budget to produce and consumers are taking advantage and having fun.
At the same time entertainment outlets, magazines, newspapers, and every other form of media are using these skills to their advantage as well. They know what appeals to the human eye, they know how we read newspapers, where our eyes are likely to look, they know where to place pictures and headlines, they know about artistic perspective and the golden ratio. They use theories of art in the production of their product, and now, they're altering photos to get a better result. It's not necessarily that they're attempting to portray an unrealistic version of reality as they are trying to sell a product, and an easy way to sell a product is to play upon our human ideals of beauty and "perfection."
It's rare that people like looking at disproportioned people. They don't like seeing unusually large people; we have a negative stereotype of anyone who is overweight in our country. A documentary call the Human Face, hosted by John Cleese and Elizabeth Hurley, delved into the perceptions we humans, as a race, have about things that look good and our ideals of beauty. Throughout the studies that were conducted, it was found, time and time again, that our ideas of what is ugly and undesirable are simply things that are vastly out of proportion.
Examples such as the Hunchback of Notre Dame are proof of this theory. People saw him as ugly because of the hunch to one side is out of proportion with the natural tendencies of the body. One whole half of his face was in disproportion to the other half; these are things we use to gauge what is pretty or beautiful.
Not only that, but there are features in the human face that refer to ideals of health and fertility, things much cherished, intuitively, by the human race. Health, youth and fertility are most easily seen in the face of a baby. They are our youth with eyes are large, rosy cheeks and small mouths; they are our ideal of 'cute.' So when we see other things that are nearly perfectly proportion with features such as high cheek bones that generally denote an austere sort of youth, large eyes, voluptuous lips and rosy cheeks, we are struck with the things that we treasure in our own ideals of reality, and thus see beauty.
Leonardo Da Vinci's golden rule, or ratio of proportion, 1.618 creeps into more pieces of art and music then any other mathematical number to date, second is pi. Many artists believe that 1.618 is the mathematician's mathematical representation of beauty, or in effect, the most beautiful number in the world. 1:1.618. It's a ratio that appears in everything from the human face, fingers, arms, feet, legs or body in general, to crystal formations, snail shells, flower petals, trees, plants and the rest of nature and art. It is our divine ratio of beauty, and when photos of humans, models especially, are edited, it is towards that goal that is aimed. Why? Because that's where the money is; it's not so much that sex sells, but the notation of sexiness, beauty and visual appeal in themselves, do.
Digital manipulation isn't solely about editing people, but it's also about making the impossible, visually possible. It's done in movies with special effects just as it's done in photography and pictures with digital manipulation; it allows an editor to make anything appear the way the editor wants. So pictures can be composited together to create a new picture for an ad; model photo-shoots can be doctored to make the person appear better then they actually look, just as things such as hair, makeup, lighting, posture, grace and clothing do in real life.
It's rare that digital editors are concerned with the reality they portray because they're only looking for the ideal image. The entire composition of media today is conducted and produced through computers, designs are edited as are pictures and text, colors are played with, and the end result is supposed to be something that appeals to us, if it doesn't then we don't buy it. Realism isn't always the goal, and nor should it be. We read books and watch movies to escape reality, we see reality everyday and we have media that portrays that. So what's wrong with the media playing upon these ideas to benefit from what other industries display and promote. Even if the majority or all of the pictures in a magazine are digitally edited, they should have full right to produce something that sells, and at the very least, it's something that can be looked at to escape reality and find beauty, real or not.