Deep Fakes and Implications for Photography

[407370]

Any photo can be manipulated and any photo (manipulated or not) can be used to fit someones personal agenda.

I have a minimal social media footprint for the purpose of avoiding this kind of scrutiny or becoming a victim of my own posting.

The example that took my breath away was of a high school girl being accused of "casual racism" because she was wearing a Chinese silk dress without actually being Chinese!!

Haters gonna hate but there seems to be an increase in hate on the internet and every posting on social media is fuelling that hate with perceived evidence.

Deep fakes are getting easier to produce every day. Anyone used LUMINAR AI yet?? its awesome but scary to think what a motivated individual could do to a photo just to post "EVIDENCE" on social media which could ruin someone's life.

 

[smoke665]

Haters gonna hate but there seems to be an increase in hate on the internet and every posting on social media is fuelling that hate with perceived evidence.

The anonymity of the internet has made it easy to speak without consequences. Obviously our forefathers didn't conceive a digital wasteland that would allow people to say things that would get them a poke in the nose in the real world.

 

[mrca]

Easy, use the old middle ages test. Have accused and accuser stick their hands in fire and the one that isn't burned is telling the truth. I think there is less of this head swapping for these purposes than done by portrait photographers to swap heads for one without a blink. This kind of stuff makes folks think photoshop is for head swapping and inevitably leads to a debate on how photoshop is "cheating." So tedious since that discussion has been going on for 20 years.

 

[smoke665]

@mrca I think most non photography people misunderstand that time is money and while doing a head swap on one image may only take 5 mins, 5 mins on 100 images in a set is a hard days work. That's why most photographers shoot to get as much right in camera as possible.

 

[Original katomi]

Re people stopping you and demanding you delete images
Suggest you look up the relevant laws for your country
Then you know where you stand re the law... yea ok it’s not worth getting a good kicking just because you are on the right side of the law
Here in uk I looked up the relevant laws for street photography
And if someone asks politely I will delete or gives me a good reason why I should not take their photo
Eg undercover police

 

[mrca]

Smoke, exactly. They think an edit is like taking a photo, one click and done. And yes, get it in camera if you can often results in too much time in post. That's why with a group, taking several images is always wise. When shooting alone, twice I have missed that the women took the band off their hair and stored it on their wrist that was in the shot. Total waste of time. That doesn't happen any more, cursing for an hour or two drives home the lesson.

 

[flyingPhoto]

@mrca I think most non photography people misunderstand that time is money and while doing a head swap on one image may only take 5 mins, 5 mins on 100 images in a set is a hard days work. That's why most photographers shoot to get as much right in camera as possible.

smoke,,, THAT is the modern theology on photography...

simply toss a batch of 100 digital images into photoshop, run the AI system on it, come back in an hour and see what was done.

The concept of getting things right in camera, or in front of the camera, BEFORE taking a photograph is actually TAUGHT as WRONG these days.

 

[smoke665]

@flyingPhoto "True editing" post has been around since the beginning in some form. Back in the 60's'/70's the darkroom was my Photoshop. The digital age and the ability to manipulate data just makes it easier and opens up new avenues. Like the comment I made earlier on head swapping, AI is another misconception promulgated by the cell phone manufactures. It lets people with no knowledge of the basics take crappy photos and add cutesy stuff to diminish the fact that it's still a crappy image. AI is nothing more than an algorithm to adjust the image based on parameters. Lightroom's "auto" button supposed incorporates learning your preferences over time into the processing. By and large it can provide a quick starting point, but it still requires individualized adjustment, and will do nothing to fix composition errors. Frankly if you intend on relying on AI post to fix your images, you'd be better off setting your camera to ""Auto" and save as JPEG.

 

[flyingPhoto]

even the PPA believes all a photographer DOES or NEEDS to do is run a batch process through photoshop or lightroom

 

[smoke665]

even the PPA believes all a photographer DOES or NEEDS to do is run a batch process through photoshop or lightroom

I use batch processing all the time for basic or uniform adjustments, but there are limitations imposed by the individual image where batch processing doesn't work. Cropping & straightening for example, or blemish corrections, or exposure/shadow/highlights/white/black points and a ton of other image specific corrections. That's why those super presets for sale, don't look the same on your image.

 

[mrca]

Smoke, a lady in her 60's I know has been taking selfies on her cell phone and applying some app for skin softening. All it seems to do is push blur to the max on skin and leave eyes sharp. She is so proud of the images I don't have the heart to tell her it makes her skin look like plastic, although the wrinkles are gone and the eyes jump out like an alien. The opposite was an older lady with wrinkles that not only ran horizontally, but also vertically. I shot her with a zeiss 100 makro planar and a 7' octa to fill in as much of the wrinkle shadows as possible, but they were still there. I was teathered and she snuck a look at the monitor and said she liked her I phone photos better. Sure a hardly sharp 2x3" image vs one on a large monitor with a sharp lens. Here's a revelation, people off these photo sites don't have a clue. They don't care what camera/lens you use, what difficult situation you are dealing with, if you edited, only that they have a great expression and it is as flattering as possible. As for folks who decry using LR/PS, the slam on photography from 1840 was it was for people who couldn't or wouldn't master painting. So is using a camera cheating? Make a portrait in a fraction of a second, not days. And along the painting example, are we required to adhere to only one style of painting, realism? Forget all that came before and the impressionists and surrealists who came after it? If you are a realist, knock yourself out. Photojournalists tend to be. But I studied with perhaps the premier photojournalistic wedding photographer and he still did work in post including toning and had a staff guy doing the heavy lifting after it was sent out for color correction etc. But what did he know, they only paid him 40-50 grand a wedding in 2011.

 

[AlanKlein]

Smoke, a lady in her 60's I know has been taking selfies on her cell phone and applying some app for skin softening. All it seems to do is push blur to the max on skin and leave eyes sharp. She is so proud of the images I don't have the heart to tell her it makes her skin look like plastic, although the wrinkles are gone and the eyes jump out like an alien. The opposite was an older lady with wrinkles that not only ran horizontally, but also vertically. I shot her with a zeiss 100 makro planar and a 7' octa to fill in as much of the wrinkle shadows as possible, but they were still there. I was teathered and she snuck a look at the monitor and said she liked her I phone photos better. Sure a hardly sharp 2x3" image vs one on a large monitor with a sharp lens. Here's a revelation, people off these photo sites don't have a clue. They don't care what camera/lens you use, what difficult situation you are dealing with, if you edited, only that they have a great expression and it is as flattering as possible. As for folks who decry using LR/PS, the slam on photography from 1840 was it was for people who couldn't or wouldn't master painting. So is using a camera cheating? Make a portrait in a fraction of a second, not days. And along the painting example, are we required to adhere to only one style of painting, realism? Forget all that came before and the impressionists and surrealists who came after it? If you are a realist, knock yourself out. Photojournalists tend to be. But I studied with perhaps the premier photojournalistic wedding photographer and he still did work in post including toning and had a staff guy doing the heavy lifting after it was sent out for color correction etc. But what did he know, they only paid him 40-50 grand a wedding in 2011.

Your conflating issues. First the viewer understands a painter's work comes from his vision and imagination. Looking at an oil, the viewer assumes it isn't an exact representation of the person or landscape or still life. With photography, however, we assume, or most use to, that the result is what existed in nature at the time the camera snapped a picture at 1/125 of a second. Sure, edits are done for cropping and exposure and contrast. But the essential elements were there at the time the photo was exposed.

Second, wedding photographers answer to their customers. We're talking about photographic process in general and what the images represent at the time they are taken, not what a married couple wants to see in the photo frame in their home.

I'm not arguing against photoshopping and editing. Everyone can do what they want. And will. The question is if the result is a photographic image captured at the time of the exposure or some representation of the photographer's imagination as an oil painter would provide.

 

[mrca]

Alan, have you ever seen a vermeer, they are realistic down to the individual knots in rug detail. Yes, for some folks, a snap shot has nothing to do with the artistic process of deciding on a message or meaning, maximizing it using lenses, camera controls and post processing to achieve that vision. For those that ASSUME a photo is merely aping what is in front of the camera, they have been asleep for a century. Even photojournalists are doing some editing these days. Steiglitz and Steichen fought this battle over 120 years ago to get photography the status of an art form. One that can be used to express the vision and message of the artist. It ticks me off to see people who see themselves as photographers, playing into the age old trope that photography isn't an art form. Granted, for many it isn't. But because someone uses a camera to create their art instead of a paint brush, doesn't make it any less an art form. The problem we face is anyone can make a recognizable image with modern cameras so they think they are photographers and many call themselves artists. They are, as much as a xerox machine.

 

[JackMiller]

Alan, have you ever seen a vermeer, they are realistic down to the individual knots in rug detail. Yes, for some folks, a snap shot has nothing to do with the artistic process of deciding on a message or meaning, maximizing it using lenses, camera controls and post processing to achieve that vision. For those that ASSUME a photo is merely aping what is in front of the camera, they have been asleep for a century. Even photojournalists are doing some editing these days. Steiglitz and Steichen fought this battle over 120 years ago to get photography the status of an art form. One that can be used to express the vision and message of the artist. It ticks me off to see people who see themselves as photographers, playing into the age old trope that photography isn't an art form. Granted, for many it isn't. But because someone uses a camera to create their art instead of a paint brush, doesn't make it any less an art form. The problem we face is anyone can make a recognizable image with modern cameras so they think they are photographers and many call themselves artists. They are, as much as a xerox machine.

Speaking as an artist, phone filters are just a novelty item.

 

[smoke665]

the result is what existed in nature at the time the camera snapped a picture at 1/125 of a second. Sure, edits are done for cropping and exposure and contrast. But the essential elements were there at the time the photo was exposed.

Not true Alan. Double exposure and other manipulations have been around since the late 1800's. Do a Google search on John Deakin from the the 30's. I frequently got creative in darkroom, adding and subtracting elements that weren't there at the time the photo was exposed.