Reuters bans freelance RAW photography to boost speed and preserve ‘reality'

Ummm.. ok.

JPEG = Reality. That better be in the next Thesaurus.

Yo dawg, you need a JPEG check!
 
Reality is more pixilated than I remember.

Heh... This is the kind of story you would expect to read on April 1st.
 
I saw the headline yesterday. I haven't bothered to read it.

But it's common to have jpeg only in certain industries already. It's not entirely uncommon. Most journalism and sports photography is all jpeg. That all has to do with the 24 hour news cycle and there just isn't time to fool around with RAW conversion. Those kinds of photographers have to know their settings inside out. Be properly white balanced in camera and get perfect exposures (as there isn't really even enough time to move sliders later). A lot of them also have to do whatever changes they're going to do in their cameras and even rate and pick their selects.

Without reading the article, I take their "point" at being about trying to preserve what actually happened (that is to say, photography as a form of documentation) and leave less space open to people doing Photoshop manipulation. This has been a problem even recently. I remember a war photographer simply removed a distracting element via photoshop and it became a massive controversy. Even though the manipulation didn't change the "content" or "context" of the image, for journalism I actually appreciate how seriously they took it even though it didn't change the story. Someone out there needs to be looking out for photographic journalistic integrity. No matter how minor. The guy was not mad at all that he had gotten caught, in the sense that he was contrite about his action. I'm sure he's done better since then.

I don't think the people calling the shots at Reuters understand that jpegs can be visually manipulated, but whatever. They have to make their decisions. This sort of stuff just makes headlines, whether it's meaningful for anyone who doesn't directly work for Reuters is an entirely different discussion.
 
There is still a lot of in camera manipulation that can be done. Raising shadows, lowering highlights, contrast, negative contrast, color shifts, sharpness. I don't really have a problem with this, they are a company and they can set their rules for submissions.

Start sarcasm....
Soon they'll say that pictures can only be taken with a 50mm lens because that is a natural human field of view. Don't forget to also only use the neutral ISO75647NEWS picture profile setting.

Starting in 2020 (this is a joke) all documentation will require video submissions instead of photographs, so the news office can pick the perfect agreeable moment. The news office needs to see what transpired before and after their chosen moment, so that no staging or illicit activities occurred.
 
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Starting in 2020 all documentation will require video submissions instead of photographs, so the news office can pick the perfect agreeable moment. The news office needs to see what transpired before and after their chosen moment, so that no staging or illicit activities occurred.

Is this a joke within a joke?
 
Is this a joke within a joke?

For sure. :p Yes that is a joke.

Though I could see that part happening sometime in the future when bandwidth speeds are better. Just pull frame grabs from video. I think it is already happening on local news stations for their webpages.
 
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