ONA Issues

Many of us have been thinking for a while about how we still refer to traditional darkroom techniques as providing suitable guidelines for what’s acceptable in digital image processing. But as we learned last week, digital is not film, it is data — and it requires a new and clear set of rules. That became painfully clear to the jury when 20 percent of the photographers entering the penultimate round — where images are considered for the top three awards — were disqualified after technicians compared the entries against the unprocessed RAW files.

Some were disqualified for sloppy Photoshop manipulation. However, a large number were rejected for removing or adding information to the image, for example, like toning that rendered some parts so black that entire objects disappeared from the frame. The jury — which was flexible about toning, given industry standards — could not accept processing that blatantly added or removed elements of the picture. When the entries were compared with the originals we could not recognize them as being the same picture.