Originally published 22 July 1991
Photographs don’t lie.
Looking at a recent snapshot. The bald spot grows bigger, the paunch harder to conceal, the lines under the eyes more weblike.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the camera saw us with the same selective vision with which we see ourselves. Or if we could amend what the camera sees.
Well, the day of the personally-customized photograph may not be far off. Just this afternoon I was adding a few tufts of hair to a photograph that showed too much of my balding pate. Uh, let’s see, how much can I add without being too obvious?
You see, for the past few weeks I’ve been using a computer to work digital magic on photographs.
I started with images of galaxies produced with a new kind of telescope camera. Few astronomers put their eye to a telescope anymore. Old-fashioned photographic film is out, too. Instead, telescopes cast their light on something called a charge-coupled device (CCD) that records an image as thousands of tiny dots. Each dot is represented as a binary number stored in a computer. The image can be displayed on a video monitor in a comfortable, heated room in the basement of the observatory — or even thousands of miles away via a phone line.
This way of doing astronomy has the advantage that computers can readily modify the image: Change the contrast, color code information, accentuate details, combine many images into one. Once the image has been stored in the memory of a computer, what can be done with it is limited only by the programmer’s imagination. It’s a way of making photographs lie, creatively, of course. Astronomers call it “digital enhancement.”
Inspired by my fun with galaxies, I began playing with photographs of family and friends.
Digital manipulation
First the photos go into a digital scanner, which turns them into arrays of invisibly tiny dots, called pixels, each pixel turned on (black) or off (white). Then the digitized images are imported into a graphics program and modified just like any other computer graphic. I can erase. Copy. Cut and paste. Tiny parts of the picture can be blown up on the screen and changed pixel by pixel.
The finished image is printed on a laser printer.
Are you unhappy with what the camera shows about you? Then scan the photo into a computer and go to work. Use the computer’s mouse like a painter’s brush or a surgeon’s scalpel. Add a tad more hair on top. Trim a sliver of flesh off the tummy. Erase those wrinkles by the eyes.
Ah, perfecto!
The equipment and programs I’ve been using on my home computer are primitive compared to state-of-the-art technology you’ll find in the graphics departments of big newspapers or magazines. High-definition scanners, expensive color monitors, and powerful software can produce modified photographs that are indistinguishable in quality from the originals.
Some of the photographs you see in magazines today have been computer-processed. Objects in the background or foreground have been deleted. Compositions modified. Colors changed.
A few years ago National Geographic created a stir by electronically moving an Egyptian pyramid in a cover photograph, to bring the peak of the pyramid within the familiar yellow frame of the cover. Even pyramids, the most massive artifacts on Earth, can be moved by computers with the click of a mouse.
Which raises the question: Can photographs lie after all?
Well, uh, yes…maybe…depends what you mean.
Photographic lies?
I’m not talking about those obvious paste-ups in supermarket tabloids, showing World War II airplanes parked on the surface of the moon or space aliens talking to George Bush. I’m talking about the kind of photojournalism you see in slick newsstand glossies. I’m talking the cover of National Geographic. I’m talking about your weekly news magazine.
Ethical issues are at stake. No one minds if a graphic artist uses a computer to change the eye color of a model in Vogue, but most of us expect news journalism to provide the truth. And the one aspect of journalism we always thought we could trust was the photograph.
And that’s the lesson of the new technologies: Cameras don’t lie, but photographs might.
I know, because I’ve been using a computer to tell photographic lies with snapshots of family and friends. Adding funny details here; subtracting there. Rearranging compositions. Mixing images.
OK, it’s just a prank. I’m not really trying to fool anybody. And those locks of hair I transplanted onto the top of my head, that’s just a prank too, a little digital enhancement.
But what about the photographs in this newspaper? Or your weekly news magazine? Or even video films on the nightly news?
Can you believe what you see?
The ubiquitous software tool Adobe Photoshop was first released commercially in 1990. Most legitimate news organizations have since developed a strict code of ethics concerning the digital manipulation of photographs. ‑Ed.
