Photo Tampering

To my surprise, photo tampering has been around for a very long time. Most wouldn't think that the technology would have been available to alter photos until the last twenty years, but actually it dates all the way back to the 1860's. Some of the first tampered photos were ones of our president, Abraham Lincoln, and some others were from the civil war. But photo tampering back then was a lot more difficult to do and only a select few would have been able to perform such altering. In the world that we live in today, almost anyone who owns a computer is able to tamper and alter photos. Since this is available to such a large amount of people, almost any photo on the internet or in a text publication may have been altered. Even smart phones now have the ability to apply a filter to make the image more clear, get rid of red eyes and even add different color scales to photos that have been taken. In some cases altering a photo is perfectly fine, but where do we draw the line?

In my personal opinion, any alterations to a photo should cause the least amount of change possible. It is okay to make an image more clear or get rid of a random arm in a photo but that's because those changes have minimal impact to the photo and it doesn't change the viewer's opinion on the photo. For instance, the photo above of the Russian army during World War 2 raising the Russian flag has been altered. In the original photo it appeared that the Russian soldier had a watch on each of his wrists. So to make it appear to the public that he had not been looting, apparently he had a watch on one wrist and a compass on the other, it was altered out of the photo all together. I personally think that this type of photo tampering is fine. Instead of having the public assume the soldier was looting, when he was not, they simply removed the watch and compass. Now had the soldier been looting that completely changes the story and removing it from the photo should be the type of photo tampering that should not be allowed. Just like if an American media outlet had changed the Russian flag to an American flag, and tried to act as if the US soldiers had captured the city. Any type of photo tampering like this, that changes the opinion of the viewer, should not be allowed.

Photo tampering is a big problem if it is being used in the wrong way. It's frightening to know that the photo being shown on the news may have been altered to produce a different type of reactions out of the public. Who knows what we've all been lied to about. 

Photo Source: http://www.fourandsix.com/photo-tampering-history/