Ethically editing news photos digitally.

• Position: Journalism - Brief Article

DigitalCustom Group, Inc., San Francisco, has issued a set of ethical guidelines for the use of digital image editing in journalism. They are designed to assist news, travel, and nature editors in formatting internal policies for the ethical, objective application of digital image editing procedures to journalistic photographs.

"These written guidelines will help reduce uncertainty and avoid embarrassing misunderstandings between journalists and digital image editors as to what procedures are appropriate for news images," explains DigitalCustom's president and CEO Jeff Makoff, adding that true professions require industrywide ethical standards, so that the customers' interests are served in a consistent way.

Some of the digital image editing procedures permitted to compensate for limitations and defects inherent in the digital photographic process, provided that the impact is to make the photograph more true-to-life (i.e., accurate), include color balancing/correction, correction of lens distortion, focus adjustments, glare elimination, overall lightening or darkening, and red eye elimination.

Digital image editing procedures generally permitted for news/editorial purposes include cropping, darkening, or focus-softening to reduce/ eliminate irrelevant material; enhancing an image, or part of an image, when it serves an investigative purpose; legally required (or advisable) concealment of a subject's...