Steve Crandall, quoted in 2004: “It may be that independent cooberation of photos (several images taken from different cameras) are required to give a warm feeling of truth.”
This week in Toledo, when several pictures of the same event were compared one was different: “Each paper had its own similar Bluffton picture. But The Blade’s picture was the only one with the mysterious blue-jean clad legs missing.” Somebody got a warm feeling of truth, but one photographer had a completely different feeling, as his retouched photos were exposed.
I’ll disclose it freely: I sometimes clean up images, removing blemishes on people’s faces and minor distracting background items — my goal for non-newspaper images is to give people a pleasing and reasonably accurate photo; nobody wants to look back at their high school prom pictures and see a big zit on their nose. But I do not edit photos that I submit to newspapers.
see also Jim G’s Ethics of Photography: Career Suicide by Photoshop.