Contrary to popular belief....

1. Photoshop’s use is not limited to producing photographs that would not meet the Trust Test.

This perception has become so common that “Photoshop” has become a verb in popular usage to signify doctoring photos (“He couldn’t be there for the group photo, so they just Photoshopped his head into the photo later”).

But except for the one quoted example in italics above, this website never uses the word “Photoshop” as a verb nor the word “Photoshopped” as an adjective for “doctored photos.”

2. Photoshop is routinely used to make photographs more trustworthy.

That’s because Photoshop is often employed to make “light”-related corrections so that a photograph doesn’t misrepresent the scene depicted, as per P7. (See also the first of the Allowable Changes.)

Almost all of the most-widely trusted news photographs of our time — viewed by billions of people around the world every day — are made digitally and processed with Photoshop or a similar program.

3. There are many ways to doctor a photograph without Photoshop (e.g., AI-GC, smartphone apps, other photo-editing programs).

4. It is easy to deceive viewers with completely undoctored photographs (see #914).