Reuters Use of Photoshop

Any old school PJ’s know if they had the same thing for the darkroom?

Depends how far back you go. The wires during the ‘60s and ‘70s saw a lot of highly “creative” burning and dodging, which was in many cases content-altering. Come the ‘80s we were printing colour in portable darkrooms, for drum transmissions, and just getting the quality reasonable took a lot of time. Un-ethical manipulation would simply have made us miss too many deadlines. At least as far as my editior was concerned, the rules were simple: “Don’t mess with it in the darkroom”..

I remember being told not to mess with pictures on the laptop, because if we did, when the image came into the office and was seen on a decent monitor it would look like total crap, as the original had been processed in a rush, on some shite laptop at a bad angle, with a coat over your head. The rate that wire images come in now, and the rolling deadlines means there’s barely any time to mainipulate anything.

I think one of the wires may already be (Getty? AP?) using a custom piece of photo software which only has certian tools, and enforces a streamlined processing and captioning workflow. It helps to standardise things as so many pics are coming in now, that its quicker at the back end if everything is the same.

I think it was created by the people who invented the Breezebrowswer software. It always struck me as a good idea, but more for time saving purposes than anything else.

Its easy to get into a tizzy over this. I’ve never seen a landscape as vivid to my eye as it was to Fuji Velvia, but I don’t remember people making a fuss about that. On most digital cameras you can create tone curves which will give you a punchy result without even entering Photoshop, and different camera chips produce different results.

Even choosing to point the camera there, and not over here, is ‘manipulation’ and subject to human choice. The question is whether the image captured is a reasonable representation of the event, and has some kind of veracity. So it boils down to the photographers integrity, and the vast majority of them are straight shooters.

Everything else is aesthetics – and I thought that was what made the medium interesting in the first place. Otherwise its no better than a CCTV camera.

You know my take on this was sort of along the lines of the way things were done in the darkroom.


It was common practice when I use to work in the darkroom to burn and dodge, or gel use filters in the enlarger to as we called it “restore” the contrast of the image. The logic I worked under as well as the rest of the photo staff I worked with was not to alter the image as captured per say. But rather restore the physically image to that as how we originally saw it because the way we saw the image in the viewfinder and how the film recorded it was not the same.


Maybe this is wrong today in the digital world, but back in the day of working with B&W, I ran under the impression of showing an image as true to the way I physically viewed it as possible. I mean no one I knew would superimpose another negative in to the enlarger to ad a dog or cat or some other eternal element to the image.

There was a post on this when the new policy was released a few weeks ago with some really lively debate…

by Ed Giles | 05 Feb 2007 22:02 | Sydney, Australia |

Thanks Ed. I tried a search before posting this thread, and came up with nothing results. I’m reading over it now.