This is quite a good article on Integrity and Photoshop.(Cheers to Meri) Bearing in mind the insane amount of editing you can do with the various pieces of digital imaging software ( like these for example - thanks again to Simon for the link) is integrity, and fidelity to what the camera saw an issue?

Well, with traditional photography and developing there is still a lot you can do to “improve” the quality of you photographs. There are ways to adjust Hue, Saturations, Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness and Blur to start with You can select exactly which part of your negative you want to print… and you can always trim the edges of the paper afterwards.(not to mention taking Black and White instead of colour because it (to quote friend of mine) “makes it look less shit… oh sorry, I mean, it’s more flattering”)

The objective of the photographer is to get the viewer to see what they they want them to see - which may or may not actually be what they saw… and the manner in which they do this is up to them. If they are taking light falling through trees, then they may well wish to increase the contrast in order to better point out what they are illustrating.

Integrity in Photography isn’t exclusive to digital. The number of faked UFO pictures and the like is testimony to that… but perhaps with the rise of digital photography allowing you to effectively develop your own photographs the tricks are becoming more widely available, and more widely publicised.