As part of our Fighting Fake News campaign, our photographic co-ordinator Mike Simmonds explains why seeing is believing when it comes to the pictures in the Telegraph & Argus.

Adobe Photoshop is not just a piece of software used in the imaging business, it’s become a verb in itself. To be ‘Photoshopped’ is to have had digital work done, and it represents both the biggest tool for good photography and possibly its greatest threat.

To be clear, Photoshop is an amazing tool.  We use it here at the Telegraph & Argus daily.  Each image is taken through the software to enhance parts of the image.

The image may be cropped - which means removing the outer edges of the full image - and the balance of colour might be corrected so that the lighting looks to the eye as normal as possible.

The user will use the tools in the program to draw the viewer’s attention to what the photographer was trying to illustrate when they took the picture.

Burning the image can focus the eye to certain parts of the picture and all images are sharpened as digital cameras need a little help to crisp up detail.

And the finished image is saved into a format which will suit the use. My Nikon camera shoots images that would cover a wall, but we might only print them 20cm across, so discarding some of the data is required!

Occasionally we get asked to remove things. Sometimes, half-joking, people ask could you "do a little work" and "make me look 20 years younger" - which is usually the time for a complement and assurance that "no work is needed there".

If details of the image have to be disguised, number plates on cars involved in accidents etc will be broken up by filters so they cannot be read - but this is done obviously so you can easily recognise where the image has been altered. 

Photoshop can, however, be used for less than honest reasons. Its abilities over the many years it’s been around are legendary.

Heads can be swapped, faces adjusted, scenes changed, images composited onto each other and all sorts of trickery produced before the image is printed.

This is where the honesty of the photographer is most important.

If the photographer's work is to be seen as genuine, the use of software and manipulation in newspapers must remain at an absolute minimum. 

Photoshopping images in the Telegraph & Argus is part of the process, but the art of the photographer is capturing it with the camera as it happened.

We all need a bit of work. If you’ve woken up with a huge spot on your forehead the day you collect 13 A grade GCSEs I might help hide it.

But I can’t move your school to Barbados, or improve that grade in science, much as you might like me to.

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