> What most people think when they say "fake", though, is a photo that has had filters applied, which makes zero sense. As the post shows, all photos have filters applied.

Filters themselves don't make it fake, just like words themselves don't make something a lie. How the filters and words are used, whether they bring us closer or further from some truth, is what makes the difference.

Photos implicitly convey, usually, 'this is what you would see if you were there'. Obviously filters can help with that, as in the OP, or hurt.

I agree global vs local edits as a discriminator, but there is a bit of a sliding scale here. For instance when you edit a photo of something that is lit by multiple light sources that have different color temperatures. The photo will produce a representation that shows more dramatic differences than you might be aware of when you look at the same scene. So when editing a photo, you may apply some processing to different areas to nudge the colors closer to how you’d “see” them.

Ditto for black and white photos. Your visual perception has pretty high dynamic range. Not least because your eyes move and your brain creates a representation that gives you the illusion of higher dynamic range than what your eyes can actually deliver. So when you want to represent it using a technology that can only give you a fraction of the dynamic range you (or your camera) can see, you sometimes make local’ish edits (eg create a mask with brush or gradients to lighten or darken regions)

Ansel Adams did a lot of dodging and burning in his prints. Some of the more famous ones are very obvious in terms of having been “processed” during the exposure of the print.

I see this as overcoming the limitations in conveying what your eyes/brain will see when using the limited capabilities of camera/screen/print. It is local’ish edits, but the intent isn’t so much to deceive as it is to nudge information into a range where it can be seen/understood.

There's an obvious difference between debayering and white balance vs using Photoshop's generative fill

> "Fake" images are images with intent to deceive

The ones that make the annual rounds up here in New England are those foliage photos with saturation jacked. “Look at how amazing it was!” They’re easy to spot since doing that usually wildly blows out the blues in the photo unless you know enough to selectively pull those back.

Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do

What about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601

Well that's why back in the day (and even still) 'Photographer listing their whole kit for every shot' is a thing thing you sometimes see.

i.e. Camera+Lens+ISO+SS+FStop+FL+TC (If present)+Filter (If present). Add focus distance if being super duper proper.

And some of that is to help at least provide the right requirements to try to recreate.

Another low tech example - those telephoto crowd shots that were popular during covid. The 'deception' happens before the light hits the sensor, but it's no less effective

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/13/pictu...

A boss once asked me "is there a way to tell if an image has been Photoshopped?" and I did eventually get him to "yes, if you can see the image it has been digitally processed and altered by that processing". (The brand-name-as-generic conversation was saved for another day.)

Eh, I'm a photographer and I don't fully agree. Of course almost all photos these days are edited in some form. Intent is important, yes. But there are still some kinds of edits that immediately classify a photo as "fake" for me.

For example if you add snow to a shot with masking or generative AI. It's fake because the real life experience was not actually snowing. You can't just hallucinate a major part of the image - that counts as fake to me. A major departure from the reality of the scene. Many other types of edits don't have this property because they are mostly based on the reality of what occurred.

I think for me this comes from an intrinsic valuing of the act/craft of photography, in the physical sense. Once an image is too digitally manipulated then it's less photography and more digital art.

> A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits,

Even that isn't all that clear-cut. Is noise removal a local edit? It only touches some pixels, but obviously, that's a silly take.

Is automated dust removal still global? The same idea, just a bit more selective. If we let it slide, what about automated skin blemish removal? Depth map + relighting, de-hazing, or fake bokeh? I think that modern image processing techniques really blur the distinction here because many edits that would previously need to be done selectively by hand are now a "global" filter that's a single keypress away.

Intent is the defining factor, as you note, but intent is... often hazy. If you dial down the exposure to make the photo more dramatic / more sinister, you're manipulating emotions too. Yet, that kind of editing is perfectly OK in photojournalism. Adding or removing elements for dramatic effect? Not so much.

Today, I trust the other meaning of "fake images" is that an image was generated by AI.

But when you shift the goal posts that far, a real image has never been produced. But people very clearly want to describe when an image has been modified to represent something that didn’t happen.

I understand what you and the article are saying, but what GP is getting at, and what I agree with, is that there is a difference between a photo that attempts to reproduce what the "average" human sees, and digital processing that augments the image in ways that no human could possibly visualize. Sometimes we create "fake" images to improve clarity, detail, etc., but that's still less "fake" than smoothing skin to remove blemishes, or removing background objects. One is clearly a closer approximation of how we perceive reality than the other.

So there are levels of image processing, and it would be wrong to dump them all in the same category.

Sidestepping the whole discussion about "fake" and "real" images, I think what matters is what degree of correlation is there, if any, between the raw sensor data and the final photo you show your friends.

Raw data requires interpretation, no argument there.

But when AI starts making stuff up out of nowhere, it becomes a problem. Again, some degree of making up stuff is ok, but AI often crosses the line. When it diverges enough from what was captured by the sensor, it crosses firmly into "made up" territory.