Editing is a powerful tool used in media to create meaning and to deliver messages effectively. It is defined by Miriam Webster as:
1 a : to prepare (as literary material) for publication or public presentation
b : to assemble (as a moving picture or tape recording) by cutting and rearrangingc : to alter, adapt, or refine especially to bring about conformity to a standard or to suit a particular purposeedited the speech> <edit a data file>
2
: to direct the publication of <edits the daily newspaper>
3
: delete —usually used with out
In the realm of editing, photo editing is a powerful practice that influences audiences based on photography that is rhetorically edited to create an impact. This is done by adjusting and contextualizing pictures to create a remediated project that speaks to an audience the way the photographer, news company or other journalistic sources prefer. When a photo is posted, people read the images presented to them to receive a message. Good photo editing gets the message across clearly and efficiently.
As many of us know, this can be controversial when it comes to changing the purpose of the original picture taken when put into other contexts that were not intended by the original photographer. Here are some examples:
When A Runner's World Photoshoot turns from this...
The photos themselves aren't touched up so much, but the context of the photos with the different purposes for different publications- one being related for Runner's World, the other completely unrelated to the photo shoot for Newsweek Magazine- both of which give the readers a completely different view of the article. The controversy here with Newsweek is that they took photos out of context, added captioning and an accompanying article to slander Palin, and made a standard athletic photo of a political figure into a more politically incorrect photo. This is where some problems are seen in the world of photo editing because of the repurposing of photos to match the purpose of the context.
Here's another example of photo editing, this time where the actual process of a print advertisement shows how much manipulation happens in editing to make sure a picture is perfect. This has been made famous by the Dove Beauty campaign to show that these advertisements and picture perfect women are not actually picture perfect, they are made that way by expert photo editors.
Here is another example of what retouching can do to a photo by simply adjusting the colors, brightness, contrast, and smoothing out lines on Photoshop. And I thought Madonna just looked REALLY GOOD for her age...
Because the process of photo editing can transform one photo into a completely different picture, I decided to do one of my own.
Here is the edited version of a photo I took near the Arch de Triomphe in Paris. Hypothetically, if I had an article or a caption about military presence in the city related to political unrest in France, it could be completely believable
However, I actually edited the above picture from the below image of a parade on Bastille day!
As you can see, I cropped myself out, edited the color, contrast, brightness and warmth tones to give it a serious, dramatic look. This shows how I used editing to remediate a photo into a completely different picture.
Editing is a wonderful tool when it comes to photo enhancement like we see in most publication (color editing, brightness, contrast, fill effects, etc.) to bring out the natural beauty of a photo, but there is a fine line between enhancement and transformation that the editor has to take into their own discretion before publishing. An infamous example would be with the controversies in Ralph Lauren ads where the models are edited to being disproportionately thin as seen here which has brought up certain laws for advertising. Hopefully if the lines are drawn, the controversies will decrease so that photoshop is a tool, not a weapon in the advertising field! That being said, I vote to leave the crazy photo jobs for professional work to actual photoshop artists who pride their awesome manipulation skills rather than attempt to hide them in an ad as something "real."
