Do readers believe what they see?: reader acceptance of image manipulation

Abstract

This study uses a random public sample to measure the level of acceptance the public has of various kinds of image adjustment/manipulation, to discover how frequently the respondents believe the same manipulations are performed on the news images in the local daily newspaper and how much they trust those images to truthfully depict the scene photograph. The study also looks for a correlation between a person's familiarity with imaging software and that person's views on, or expectations of, digital manipulation of the news images. The findings indicate the public's acceptance of the various digital adjustments mirrors the profession's though the respondents were less accepting of burning and dodging. The findings also show that many of the readers believe drastic image manipulations are performed far more frequently than they actually are. No correlation was found between a person's familiarity with imaging software and the level of trust assigned to news images.