Another thing Jerry Lodriguss states in his article is that sometimes the only way to get a true representation of reality in a picture is by editing it to make it truer to reality. The article goes on to explore where the line is between ethical and unethical when it comes too digital manipulation. It comes down to the intentions of the person editing the photo. Some people have no intentions of using an image to fool people or for profit, but simply art etc. There are different arguments in what people believe is ethical or not, for example "you could argue, completely legitimately, that the real beauty is out there in nature, in reality, and that any recording, or representation of that beauty in a photograph or painting is only a pale imitation of the real thing"
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Ethical
Not only can digital manipulation sometimes be used for good, In some situations it would be unethical not to digitally alter the content of a photograph, such as when a photo definitely records something incorrectly, such as red eye or noise. Noise is the photography term for the visual distortion you see in photos, when bad noise can ruin a photograph. In photoshop there are many different ways to reduce the noise such as the "reduce noise" filter or playing around with the layers. The noise would have never been in the original photo so it isn’t unethical to get rid of it. The line drawn between ethical and un-ethical the problem with digital manipulation and the important questions when we manipulate an image are, why are we doing this, and what are our purposes and intentions? As you have already seen on the previous pages, people have different purposes for manipulating an image and it can be bad. As stated by Jerry Lodriguss in his "The ethics of digital manipulation" article "In my opinion, as long as the artist does not try to misrepresent what they are doing and methods are completely explained in the caption, it is an aesthetic judgment as to their success or failure." With Digital manipulation and ethics most of it comes down to different opinions on what they think is ethical or unethical. For example, to some people the image on the left will be funny to them, and they will take it as a joke but for other people they may find the image completely unfunny and disrespectful. |