The Difference Between Photo Editing and Photo Manipulation!

Today I’d like to announce the new series of blog posts called “Photo Editing”. As I'm quite passionate

about playing with photo effects apps on my iPhone (I love the vignette and lomo effect), I thought it

would be interesting to write a few posts about it: what photo editing is, how it all started, what photo

effects are most commonly used among iPhoneographers and what the most popular iPhone photo

editing apps are.

Let me begin with defining the photo (image) editing process. What is it? Do you use any iPhone

photo editing app like Snapseed, Hipstamatic, Picshop, or Vintique to add filters, to crop, to resize, to

change color, or maybe to adjust brightness/saturation/contrast of your photos? If the answer is

“Yes”, then you do photo editing. In other words, photo editing “encompasses the processes of altering

images, whether they be digital photographs, traditional analog photographs, or illustrations”, as

described on Wikipedia.

At this point it’s important to distinguish between photo editing and photo manipulation because

these two are commonly mistaken. According to deviantART, a very popular online social network for

artists and art enthusiasts, photo manipulation is “an image that is composed of two or more

photographic elements to create something new”. For example, you take the background from one

photo and combine it with a person from another photo. Or here’s another example: you take specific

elements from one photo and duplicate or transform them in a way that you change the original

composition of items.

In “Deceptive meanings of illusional photo manipulation world” blog post you can find very nice visual

explanations to this issue.

To sum up, the main difference between photo editing and photo manipulation is in the type of

elements you are changing. If you try to enhance or correct separate digital elements like brightness,

contrast, size, or color in one single photo then you are doing photo editing. Whereas if you are

adding photographic elements to a photo like duplicating items or combining elements from

different photos into a new one then you are doing photo manipulation.

Example: I took a photo of a flower and did both, photo editing and photo manipulation.

Here's the original photo.

Then I did some photo editing with Vintique app. I used the “dim past” filter. I edited the filter and

added Vig1 vignette effect.

Below you can see an example of photo manipulation. I copied the original flower a few times and

made a new photo.

Starting with the next blog post, I will focus on photo editing only explaining its history, before and

after digital age, types of photo editing as well as examples of some of the most popular photo editing

iPhone apps.