I thought PJ doesn't allow retouching

MattKing said:

I find use of the term "retouching" to be quite strange (in this context).
Retouching was traditionally used to minimize/remove/hide features that were considered to be unwanted - things like wrinkles and pimples.
The discussion in the thread (and the rules people refer to) seems to be more about falsification in general - manipulation that tends to change the nature of the subject presented.
If someone burns in a distracting reflection off a button on a shirt, or darkens a distracting corner of a window in the background, they may be changing the photograph, but they aren't mis-representing in any way the subject in the photograph (unless the button and background window's tone are meaningful in some way). Essentially, they are just dealing with a mis-step in the photographic process.
It doesn't make sense to exclude that purely technical and essentially non-editorial item.

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MattKing said:

I'm not sure I understand why you think that dealing with the mask is "processing". Somehow it seems to me that dealing with a negative image with reversed colours requires more "processing" than dealing with a simple colour mask.

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Cholentpot said:

First thing that came to mind. In post a simple invert will work for B&W. Not so with C-41, you need to do a whole bunch of jiggery porkery to get a normal looking image.

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MattKing said:

Ah, you are talking about operator adjustments.
They are way less involved then the complex processing that happens before you get to them - the inversion of the colours in particular.
If your scanning software is set up properly, most images will come up close to normal, because C41 films are all designed to be printed to RA4 paper.

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Cholentpot said:

I DSLR scan. It was a long painful road to get everything properly inverted and colored. Made me appreciate the complexity of C-41. I now have a more or less automated system which gets me 90% of the way. Still need to adjust the white balance and lighting curves manually.

I never printed RA4, I do print B&W and the amount that you can mess with is underestimated.

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Eric Rose said:

We should be more concerned about truth and accuracy spoken by our political leaders than PJ's imho.

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keenmaster486 said:

I think National Geographic may have a good thing going with their guidelines. Perhaps a good rule of thumb to draw from that is "Does it look the way you saw it when you pressed the button?" If not, it's not representative of the original scene and therefore questionable for photojournalism purposes. Maybe good art, but bad photojournalism.

As for colorization, when an image is colorized, it ceases to be the original image and becomes more of an "artists rendering."

Which I don't see anything wrong with, by the way. I enjoy colorized images as a way to look into the past, but not as if I am looking at an "enhancement" of the original photo. It's a different animal.

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