By now, practically every photographer and visual artist has surely heard of one of the features that will arrive in Adobe Creative Suite 5‘s Photoshop upgrade: content-aware fill.
If you haven’t heard of this feature, all you need to do is watch the below video. And make sure you watch it through to the end.
I don’t think anyone can deny that this fill feature is an amazing achievement in technology and software. To eliminate whole trees and roads, and to fill in blue skies, rugged desert landscape, cloudy skies and anything else — with just a few clicks — well, that’s just amazing.
It’s also incredibly dangerous. I don’t think anyone with at least a basic understanding of photo/visual journalism ethics can deny that this fill feature allows for substantial manipulation and, if used, provides a very steep “slippery slope” toward letting nothing prevent one from publishing the “perfect” photo.
This afternoon, August and I briefly discussed the temptations and dangers imposed by the feature. The following is the end of our conversation:
- Me: This means the death of photojournalism.
- August: No, it just means the death of people’s trust in our photos.
- Me: Exactly — this means the death of photojournalism.
- August: Yeah… you’re right.
In short? If it works as effectively and efficiently as advertised, the content-aware fill feature is a godsend for portrait and commercial photographers. But I certainly hope that no photo/visual journalist considers using this tool.
Words and Light 
I don’t think it will be the death of photojournalism. I get your melodramatic point, though.
I think photojournalists will fervently strive to maintain our sense of ethic—refusing to alter a photo in a way that changes the scene of the photograph.
However, there will be people who use it. Hopefully they will be caught and be given the full hand of punishment.
Melodramatic? Yeah — but we see what steps and changes some photojournalists are willing to make in order to win contests, get magazine covers, publish big photo spreads. It’s bad enough that a “photojournalist” can win third place in a contest after submitting a piece-of-garbage photo with added noise and a fake vignette; its even worse that he thinks he can salvage his reputation after being disqualified for cloning someone’s foot out.
Definitely hope that the code of ethics wins over any temptation to use this tool.
I don’t see what everyone is flipping out about… I saw at least 4 Facebook posts today that basically equated to people running around screaming with their arms flailing above their heads over this new technology.
I think people get all bent out of shape whenever new technology like this comes out. Can you imagine when digital photo editing software was first announced? I mean, you could **gasp** TONE PHOTOS WITHOUT A DARKROOM!!!
The point is, there is so much technology out there right now that people already don’t trust photography. It is not like everyone has trusted photography for the last 10 years and all of a sudden this new Photoshop technology will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I could list you off a few dozen photo altering scandals that happened in just the last 5 years.
Hopefully, people will understand that Photojournalism aspires to a much higher ethical level that other forms of photography. And, like always, the few bad photojournalism apples that do digitally remove objects with this new technology will be fired from their jobs and be made examples of across the internet.
Personally, I am not worried.
I can probably list quite a few of the same photo-altering scandals from the past few years. Everyone knows that photos have been altered since before digital technology developed — that photo of Mary Vecchio at Kent State was, at some point, altered so the pole sticking out of her head was removed.
The problem here is how easily and quickly the content-aware fill feature enables anyone to make changes that before would have taken hours and probably a combination of various Photoshop tools. If so tempted, a photojournalist on a quick turnaround assignment could use this new tool in a matter of minutes before wiring his photo in, instead of sending it as is because making any changes would have before taken more time. The new tool will also probably make this kind of manipulation harder to detect — probably the only way to know whether it was used is to demand to see the original file.
I hope others and I have no cause to worry, but the bottom line is, this tool enables a lot of manipulation and would tempt a substantial slippery slope.
It’s inevitable that someone will do it. But the judges of WPP looked at the original image, and he was disqualified.
If you went to POYi or CPOY more this year you would have noticed that over-toning & vignettes didn’t fool judges. They consistently spoke about style and even knocked down a story because they thought it was “too stylized.” In fact, an Issue Reporting Story (Freelance/Agency) didn’t get an Award of Excellence because of it.
You could also make the argument that a photojournalist on a quick turnaround assignment could just tell his or her subject what to do in order to get the shot. That is easy right? It also doesn’t take much time. But do we do that? No.
I don’t think that the content-aware feature is going to all of a sudden strip the ethics of a journalist on deadline. Just because it is easier, doesn’t mean that photojournalists are going to start going against everything they have been taught. If someone was even considering using this tool because they were on a tight deadline, then they are weak and should really reconsider being in this business.
I honestly do not think that the new feature will be that seamless- there are always ways to tell if somebody has messed with their photographs. This is not the death of photojournalism- it’s the beginning of the separation of photographers from photojournalists- people with ethics. If you are serious about photojournalism, you won’t even think about using this. It’s a no brainer. I don’t think that many people actually understand what photojournalism can do now, and people probably think photoshop can already do that in seconds!
Be ethical in your own work, that’s all you can do sometimes.
I like your approach, Chelsea — that how/whether the tool is used separates photojournalists from the broader pool of photographers.