
Time Magazine's cover picture about the protests in Iran carries a credit line that says the photo has been "digitally altered." It doesn't say HOW the photo was altered, so I find the disclosure pretty much useless.
It's fairly common practice for page designers to extend the sky at the top of a picture or the dark areas at the bottom of a picture to fill out the dimensions of a page, and/or to create a handy place to put text. But Time doesn't say exactly what was done to the cover photo, and I find myself doubting that it is even a photo at all.
It's possible that the sky was extended here. I don't think the photographer would compose the picture with all that empty space at the top of the frame. It just doesn't make sense, compositionally speaking. So sure, the designer could create a place for the cover text to go.
But without more information about the digital alteration, I found myself looking harder at the overall picture, and the more I do, the more it looks like a collage to me. Was the woman really standing in the foreground with her arms raised like that? Or was she "layered" into the photo? Was she really standing in front of structure that way? And what is that fence with the people standing behind it in the middle of the frame? Was that really there too? Or is this a composited picture with three or four source photographs?
I don't have a problem at all with composited photos. I once tried for days to get a shot of New York's Times Square that conveyed all the energy and light and movement of the scene, and I found it impossible to get. So I brought pieces of FIVE photos together, and I thought it worked ok:

In the age of digital, telling the truth photographically is more important than ever. Any publication that wants to maintain its credibility and authority owes it to readers to explain what was done to a photo, and why. It's been a battle for years. Remember when New York Newsday doctored photos to show ice-skating rivals Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan on the same practice rink before the Olympics? Remember the differences in skin tone between Time and Newsweek versions of the same shot of O.J. Simpson? And remember when an L.A. Times photographer was fired for cloning in a bit of the crowd in a protest photo from Iraq?
Photo editors for news organzations are generally pretty clear on the subject: You can't alter an image digitally beyond what might be done in a darkroom. You can adjust for exposure, color balance and saturation, say, but you can't put something there that wasn't there in the original.
Back a few years ago at the Chronicle, we had a special baseball preview section that raised similar concerns. The cover shot prominently featured then-Giants manager Dusty Baker. His arms were extended, and he was holding a ticket in one of his hands. But the frame cut off a tiny portion at the end of the ticket. A page designer filled in the corner of the ticket because it suited his design needs for the cover. That sparked an hours-long "conversation" between the art department and the photo department that at times got more than a little hot. We eventually decided to have a somewhat less than perfect design for the sake of maintaining the integrity of the photo. The photo hadn't been altered significantly at all, but we all felt (well, almost all of us felt) that the principle was worth defending.
I'm pragmatic about it. If a compelling cover about the Iranian election leads more people to read about what's happening there, I'm all for it. And if you want to use a combination of two or three or a dozen photos to create that compelling cover, that's fine. But just tell me that's what's going on. And that means saying more than Time has in this case, that a photo has been "digitally altered." That's just not enough.
