Photoshop Code of Ethics

By Jennifer Farley | Nov 29 2007 |

Scott Kelby has an interesting post about his own personal code of ethics when using photoshop. I would certainly agree with most of them and have similar thoughts myself.

One “rule” he mentions is ;

(1) This may sound silly, but I absolutely hate cropping in Photoshop, and go out of my way to avoid it. I want to do my composing in the camera, so if I wind up having to crop later in Photoshop, I feel like I didn’t “Get it right in the camera,” and it drives me nuts.

I also aim to get the best possible shot to begin with too, but sometimes I find I can improve the picture enormously by doing a tight crop - particularly with pictures of people or a picture taken very quickly, without time to compose the way I’d like to. I also find that now I’m using an 8 MP camera, that the images are so large that if I’m not happy with a landscape oriented picture, I’ll actually crop it into portrait shape just to make sure I see only what I want. In fact, I love cropping. There, I’ve said it!

Any of you guys have some Photoshop ethics you’d like to share?

Comments

One Response to “Photoshop Code of Ethics”

Chris Coyier on December 3rd, 2007 3:06 am

It brings up the issue of manipulation and copyright. Let’s say you come across a really nice high-res, very copyrighted, image. Let’s say you clip out a small portion of it, manipulate it quite a bit, and use it in some kind of collage.

Is it still illegal? How much (or how little), do you have to do to skirt the law?

Certainly if you just made it black and white and republished it, that would be illegal, but if you ran it through a threshold and added a bunch of noise or something, it would be barely recognizable and then what?

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