How to Ethically Edit Imagery for Your Marketing Material
I’m a graphic designer and a photographer. Permit me to share an ethical dilemma that happened earlier this month. I’ve been working on enhancing my portfolio site, and I needed a photo for the top header. And lookie-lookie! I found one! A desert scene I shot while visiting Phoenix, Arizona. Nothing says I’m an Arizona designer and photographer like that, right?
Well, not so fast. In order for this photo to work with my logo, I had to Photoshop several saguaro cactii out of it. This being Arizona, where many of my clients come from, someone is bound to say, “Hey, Martha, that scene is from the Desert Botanical Garden. I know that spot. Where did the saguaros go?”
Good point. Not only that, elsewhere on my website, I say that I use a photojournalistic, “shoot it as it is” approach. Which means that I shouldn’t be slaying saguaros in Photoshop.
So, having spent the better part of a day trying to make this photo work with my layout, I discarded it.
Which means that I’ll just have to go out and shoot another top header photo that says “Arizona.” Since I live and work in Tucson, Arizona, this won’t be difficult. And this time, I’ll be more careful about how I position myself vis-a-vis the saguaros. If they’re part of the picture, they’re part of the picture. That’s how photojournalism works. You shoot the scene as it is.
This is not to say that I don’t use Photoshop when I’m processing images. I do. But, in order to keep my images aligned with what was originally photographed, I limit my processing to:
- Smart Sharpening. I’ve yet to meet a digital image that doesn’t need a bit of this.
- Making minor adjustments to color, contrast, and levels. For this job, I like to use Photoshop’s Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color.
- Cropping to fit the space that the photo must fit into. This is very important if the photo’s going into a layout, rather than standing on its own.
- Removing marks left by dust, lint, and other foreign objects on the lens. Ditto for hot pixels, which are those extra-bright points that can occur with longer exposure shots. I hate it when these things happen, but they do. Time to break out the Photoshop Clone Stamp for some careful retouching.
And there, in a nutshell, are my rules for handling my own photos. With photos supplied by design clients, I tend to follow these rules, but there are times when judgment calls must be made. Take, for example, my 74-year-old client. Last month, I redesigned her website, and that project included the addition of an updated head and shoulders portrait.
The portrait came from a local photographer who I recommended. (We both belong to the same photographers’ meetup group.) He did a great job, and my client was very impressed with the fact that he brought a makeup artist along with him.
The image he supplied to me was at 300 pixels per inch, and that’s okay for print work. For a website, the image needed to be downsampled to 72 ppi, and after that was done, the image looked fuzzy. That’s to be expected when images get downsampled.
Now, here’s the judgment call: The client is in her seventies, and Smart Sharpening the photo back into proper focus would really make her wrinkles show. Older women tend to be self-conscious about such things.
Since she’s a longtime client, I want to keep her happy. I added enough Smart Sharpening to get the obvious blur out of the photo, but not so much that she’d be unhappy with how her face looks. So far, I’ve heard only good things from her about the site. Which indicates that the judgment call was made properly.
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Nice tip!
Great stuff… I love the focus on “limiting” or restrain from over doing it
It strikes me as odd that you use the Auto contrast, color, and levels to take care of you adjustments. I understand they can be a quick little boost to your photo most of the time, but since you’re a professional photographer and designer, I figured you’d want a bit more say in things.
At the last design firm I worked with, the art director went ape sh!t if you used the auto adjust features. I guess in her mind, anyone worth their weight as a designer should be able to tweak those controls precisely without the use of the auto features.
Thoughts? Was this just an anal art director, or is using the auto adjustment features a bit of a cop out, an easy fix that anyone can do?
In the olden days, Photoshop’s auto correction features weren’t as good as they are now. Basically, they went “too far.”
I’ve never tried Auto Contrast or Auto Color, but these days I find Auto Levels works for me about 70% of the time. However, it will still often go too far and I find myself pulling back the sliders a tad or adjusting one channel because the lighting has caused Photoshop to overcompensate in one direction.
Of course, if your art director were really anal, she’d insist on using Curves instead.
However, working in prepress, Levels was much quicker and easier to learn; we didn’t have the time to invest in the learning curve for Curves. (Get it? Curves.)
Curves is definitely the way to go. I was shocked and a bit dismayed when I saw the use of Auto tuning features in this article… and I am by no means a graphic designer… just a web programmer that hustles his way into the occasional logo of front end job.
Thanks for such an interesting article. I loved the story about the 74 year old lady, it is so true, old darlings are concious of such things. It was the right call to make, however, I have seen a picture of a woman who was photoshopped beyond belief for a magazine cover. She ended up looking as if she had the smoothest skin in the world and with perfect features. That was unethical!
Nice article! Its very important for designers and creatives in general, to tackle different situations the right way. Each case, each client is a new challenge and requires a totally different approach!
Nice article Martha!
Martha, every single time I find myself engrossed in a Freelance Switch article, it’s one of yours.
As for reductions in Photoshop, I noticed the same fuzziness issue. I found that the “Bicubic Sharper” setting in the Image Size dialog works pretty well at holding decent sharpness during a reduction.
Of course, maybe you were already using that setting, I don’t know. Anyway, thank you for another awesome article!
Good article, I definitely gets me thinking. I believe that this approach to photo use has its appropriate places. Obviously for photographers, specifically. If I’m using a photo that a client provided; that they paid to have taken (your portrait example), I either contact the photographer to request adjustments, or I take the same approach you’ve discussed here.
However, I don’t see this being applicable to stock photography, or photography that I’ve paid for. Its difficult enough to find an image that will fit the job at hand. More often than not, some (if not a lot of) photoshop is needed for correction, or my own artistic vision. Just my .02 (or .003 with our current economy!)
Since my background is in art direction I tend to use the photo as a starting point and make it look exactly how I want it in Photoshop. I see your dilemma though. For you it’s different. I know, if I were better at Photography I wouldn’t have to do so much PS work!
You didn’t make this explicit but to me the ethical issue isn’t whether to remove the saguros or not, but whether doing that while telling people you shoot it like it is would be right.
If you’re making the argument that editing the cacti out is always wrong i can’t agree – it might be the right choice for a given project and if you’re not passing the picture off as a true representation of the scene, it’s fine. For example, I can see a client saying “I need a stark desert photo… that’s nice, but can you get rid of the cacti?” with the picture being used to convey a feeling (vs saying “this is a scene from viewpoint X”). That’s fine. Doing that same edit when it’s passed off what someone would see at that point or doing it when your rep is that your photos are always candid and unedited isn’t only unethical, its a branding mistake.
Downsizing in photoshop from 300 to 72 DPI should not result in fuzziness – bicubic rsesample (different options are available) … upscaling produces fuzziness but not the other way around if done correctly.
I don’t think it is necessary to explain your reasoning for editing photos. Utilizing a photojournalistic style is totally different than photojournalism itself. The former suggests that you want your image to tell a story while the latter suggests that your image IS the story.
Look at most modern wedding photography. Mostly shot in a photojournalistic style, yet with unnatural lighting and totally open for vast post-processing to make the images look the best that they can look because that is what the client desires.
I was expecting this article to delve into deeper issues. Denise McGill (U. of S.C. Professor) recently wrote an interesting article concerning non-profits ethical use of imagery. It brings up some points that you might find interesting.
http://mcgillmedia.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/ethics-in-non-profit-photography/
I was expecting similar content. This entry made me think it’s small potatoes SEO fodder… I’m going to check out that link… thanks.
P.S. There was a comment about downsizing and fuzziness above… ditto. That didn’t make sense to me either.
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