Reuters did Doctor Photos from Beirut

With photo alteration all over the world news and blogs these days, it seems that there are more so-called “photo alteration experts” out there then there are professional people making alterations. It comes as no surprise that the now infamous Beirut photographs by Adnan Hajj of Reuters was discovered because any truly experienced photo editing expert could point out the unprofessional way that the photos were modified. More simply, it plain looked faked.

Expert photo editors will tell you that the best modifications in photographs are the ones that only the editor can recognize because they were done so well. The general public shouldn’t even be able to know the difference because the alterations done by someone with true skill and experience is undetectable. For instance, I was asked to edit a photograph for a high level official at work and there wasn’t anything nefarious about it. They just wanted to take someone out of the background of a photo to make it look more like a portrait then some random shot at a public event. When I was done, not only was the official surprised at the seamless look of the modifications, but the man I removed from the photo was baffled by the photo since he had seen the original. His comments were something to the effect that he knew something had changed but he couldn’t immediately identify what. When I pointed out the change he was astonished that he hadn’t noticed. In that is my point.

If modifications are going to be made, they should most certainly be done by someone with the skills necessary to make it look seamless and natural. Otherwise, they shouldn’t be done at all as proven with the Beirut photos. From the public’s perspective, I’m sure there may be some shock in the fact that photos that end up on the News and other media outlets are being modified regularly. This should not be surprising though as public image and perception modification has been the normal practice for decades by all countries and their media outlets. It goes back as far as the origins of video and graphic media. Even the Nazi Party of Germany and Hitler’s own Public Relations officials put extreme pressures on image control and perception manipulation. In fact, in the post World War two era many of the Nazi Parties image control tactics were adopted by the Democracies and other governments around the world. The US is certainly not exempt from this sort of practice. Just look at Fox News or any other news program on a Sunday morning.

Thus we have the media situation at present in the world today where the modification and tampering of news is not so much the issue as modifying the image so poorly that the general public can recognize it. To think that this sort of modification shouldn’t happen is frankly laughable at this point. Propaganda has been elevated to such a high level in recent years with the advancement of technology. It’s foolish to expect that this practice would ever change or to think that only one party or political affiliation is doing the modifications alone. Image manipulation does not go along party lines. In fact it’s one of the few things that still cross all party lines these days. Pushing blame in this issue is just making a political issue out of propaganda and that is a completely different discussion all together and rather ironic if you think about it.