manipulation

Since the earliest cave drawings, artists have interpreted the world around them in ways that best communicate what they want the viewers to understand.

The Africa Geographic 2019 winner "Tim in Amboseli National Park, Kenya is a great photo. It shows Tim the elephant majestically backlit against a dramatic sky. Except, it didn't win: it was later disqualified for excessive manipulation.

There is a lot of discussion these days about the pros and cons of post-processing. Is it good or bad, why do we do it at all, shouldn’t photography be representative of reality? Authentic? Isn’t the image out of a camera the real thing? Isn’t editing cheating?

When an article critical of excessive photo manipulation (such as replacing the sky or adding fake reflections on water) is posted on photography news websites, it often generates a flood of comments, both in agreement and disagreement.

A photo archive that documents the 78 days between the U.S. election and inauguration is the first to be verified by the standards set by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), illustrating how newsrooms can address the problem of false or misleading information.

Almost 9 months after announcing the so-called Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) for preventing image theft and manipulation online, Adobe has finally released details on how this special authentication system will work when they begin rolling it out later this year.

Following hot on the heels of Instagram's new (and at times controversial) "False Information" warning, Twitter has just announced its own policy around labeling and warning users about photos and videos that have been "deceptively altered" and manipulated.

The Alphabet company Jigsaw—formerly known as Google Ideas—has released a free tool called Assembler that was designed to help journalists identify manipulated imagery, no matter how sophisticated the trickery might be.

Police departments aren't often accused of unethical Photoshop manipulation, but that's the controversy that has erupted in Portland, Oregon. The police were discovered to have Photoshopped a suspects mugshot to make his face look more like the perpetrator in a bank robbery.

In this 9-minute video tutorial from Serge Ramelli, learn how to easily swap out an unattractive white sky from a photo for a more dramatic one using Photoshop. Utilizing the power of the multiply blend mode, it's possible to convincingly change the sky in the shot in minutes.

There is something amiss with the photo above. I’m not talking about the missing teeth on the left -- that’s the correct photo. The problem is the photo on the right. Surely we have lost the plot when we start Photoshopping an 8-year-old’s gappy grin.

Another year and another controversy for World Press Photo. This year, photographer Ramin Talaie raised questions about the authenticity of Hossein Fatemi who took 2nd place in long-term projects with his An Iranian Journey.

Every week, Apple selects an application from the iOS App Store and makes it available for free to anyone with an Apple ID. This week’s app is ‘Matter’ by Pixite, which is normally $2. It allows you to add surreal 3D objects to your photographs. With only a few taps, you can add three-dimensional effects to your pictures with realistic shadows and reflections.

Ok, let's just be honest for a second here: everyone and everything in the world looks drastically cooler with wings. Period. It's just the way it is.

In middle school when I was heavily into my "drawing magical fantasy creatures" phase (it never ended by the way... just ask my sketchbook), I used to check out this "how to draw animals" book from the library all the time. Really they should have just given it to me, I had it checked out so often.

Millions of people -- including many world leaders -- took to the streets of France this past weekend to show solidarity in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. The gathering in Paris, the largest in the history of France, made the front pages of major newspapers around the world.

One ultra-orthodox Jewish newspaper decided to cover the story a little differently, though: it's front page photo was a manipulated one that left out female world leaders.

In recent years there has been more pressure than ever to minimize -- or outright ban -- the Photoshopping of models in advertisements. But beyond the positive PR/respect that such a move might garner, it turns out there might actually be a financial benefit to saying no to Photoshop.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are blowing minds with

Late last month, we shared with you a story about a team of computer scientists, archivists, artists and curators who recovered photo-manipulation work by famed artist Andy Warhol that had been trapped on 41 ‘lost’ floppy disks from the introduction of the Amiga computer system.

Today, we dive further behind the scenes with a fascinating followup video, provided by the Hillman Photography Initiative of the Carnegie Museum of Art, that takes a look at the incredible amount of work and dedication that went into actually recovering these files.

As digital photographs become easier and easier to create, edit, and share, it's also becoming easier to doubt the authenticity of photos. There have been quite a few stories in recent days of photojournalists, news organizations, and contest winners throwing their reputations away by using Photoshop to manipulate the truthfulness of photos.

Izitru (pronounced "is it true") is a new free service that aims to make it easier for honest photographers to prove the authenticity of their images.

Photoshop takes a lot of flack in this day and age, especially when it comes to the beauty and fashion industries that consistently publish overly manipulated imagery. Often that 'flack' doesn't give us much to laugh at, but a recent project by East Carolina University student Anna Hill does.

She put together four mock Photoshop ads that poke fun at just how far the beauty industry often takes photo manipulation.

If you were wanting to have your mind blown today, the video above might do it. It's a demonstration of a piece of 3D object extraction and manipulation software that made its debut at SIGGRAPH 2013, and it may just offer a glimpse into the future of photo manipulation.

Swedish photographer and retouch artist Erik Johansson creates amazing photo manipulations -- in fact, we've actually featured his work before. This, however, is the first time we've had the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these manipulations come together.

In the video above he gives us a glimpse at how he created the manipulation Drifting Away, all the way from the first sketch to the final 123-layer manipulation.

Madrid-based photographer Silvia Grav's work is best described as "surreal." Paired with poetic captions that Google Translate simply doesn't do justice to, each black-and-white photo manipulation holds a deep artistic meaning.

Elaborately staged tableaus have become a staple of fine-art photography and something of their own medium -- the artistry of a Gary Salter or Annabel Mehran image is as much in the building of the scene as the actual photography.