What Is Image Integrity?

The photo above is of a Bluetail Damselfly, ischnura heterosticta, and taken at midday in full sunlight. The image is from the unprocessed, raw NEF file.

I was at a workshop last winter and the question about HDR, high dynamic range, photography came up. An HDR image has a much broader range of luminance which permits showing details in shadows, mid tones, and highlights that are not visible in normal photography. Often, the result is dramatic.

The workshop instructor, a noted editorial photographer, dismissed HDR images. They were not truthful representations of a scene. The implication was that any technique that artificially adds or removes detail from an image undermines its integrity as a record of an event.

Several years ago, if I remember correctly, National Geographic used a photo of the pyramids of Giza in which some distracting details had been digitally removed. There was a outcry when people learned of this. It caused a stir then and still gets mentioned now.

There are limits, based on earlier non-digital photography, to how far a finished image may diverge from the source: the negative. It is permissible to use cropping to create a more forceful composition and dodging and burning to increase or decrease detail in highlights and shadows. Nothing is permanently added or taken away from the source.  It is still possible to verify the reality portrayed by comparing the negative with the print. The integrity of the image is maintained like the chain of evidence in a CSI TV show.

With digital media the whole thing goes out the window. At the heart of digital imaging is its plasticity and ease of editing. To maintain content integrity, the original image file should not be manipulated, it should only be copied and only the copies edited. It falls to the photographer, the photo editor, and everyone else who handles image files to refrain from altering the original content.

Here is the same damselfly image after processing with Lightroom and Photoshop and is not an HDR image. Does this qualify as an editorial image? Even though I did not remove or add elements to the image, I did manipulate its color, luminance, tonality (shadows, mid tones and highlights), and apparent sharpness.  Some visual data was lost while other data, not readily apparent was discovered, the golden pollen grains on the leaf and damselfly.

This image is what I saw in my minds eye not through the lens of the camera.

Does this image have editorial integrity or is it an artistic fabrication?

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