This audio blog focuses on a proposed French law that would require all Photoshop manipulated images of a person to carry a warning label- give a listen. One quick note, in the audio I say that taking two aspirins and eating a banana on one foot will make you 6 inches taller… I meant to say will not.
Link to Article on French Law:
Figital Revolution 
Thanks very much for your audio blog. There must be some way to inform the public about how much a photo has been altered from the RAW image. Yes, there is much manipulation prior to taking the photo – where to stand, what to crop out, when to push the shutter – but once you’ve frozen the moment you do have an element of truth in the photo. It is a single point of view, but it is an eyewitness account of something that happened. Everything after that changes the truth of the moment.
I’ve often wondered if you couldn’t indicate a retouched photo by cutting off one or more corners, or putting a tiny number in one corner, depending on how much manipulation was used. Thus most ad campaigns would be maxed out for manipulation and they would indicate this by the trimmed corners. All photos billed as true photojournalism should have no manipulation.
Photography is singled out from other media because it is perceived as truth. Nobody thinks a concert vocalist is real, but a photograph carries some moral weight, or at least it should.
Thanks again for your interesting blog,
Gary
Nice listen Stephen, those crazy French huh? 🙂 I can see what they are trying for but as you rightly state it would just never work, it’s just plain bonkers mad!
Now maybe someone should point them to some of the works of the great masters like Ansel Adams for instance and make them understand how much of that “AA” look came from post processing and image manipulation once he’d entered the darkroom. If you compare the AA prints “we know and love” to the actual original shots/prints they are like comparing apples to oranges in the majority of cases. How about the great Henri Bresson too, should [i]some[/i] of his unique candid shots carry a big sticker across them because they were in fact not eau natural as many thought at the time but in fact staged?
When you look at imaging as a whole and not just *digital* the wider picture begins to make ideas like this sound exactly as they are, plain crazy.