Whenever The Verge interviews people from companies that have something to do with photography or image processing, they ask "what is a photograph?". There doesn't seem to be a consensus.

As a photographer, I've thought a fair amount about it. Many of the most famous pre-digital photographers did a lot of adjustment in the darkroom, and all digital photographs involve decisions about how photoreceptor data gets transformed into a viewable image, even if the photographer didn't make them intentionally. Most of the time, most people still consider it photography and "real" with significant editing.

Where it becomes something else in my mind, or "fake" is if the image doesn't reasonably represent light that reached the lens in the moment being depicted. There's a whole lot of wiggle room there of course - photography is art, not math. Adding fire to something that wasn't burning using editing software, however clearly crosses the line into "fake" for me if presented as a photograph, or digital art if it's not.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 hours ago

For me, it depends on the context. Is it trying to portray something that actually happened?

That's why, for me, I'd argue this is fake. Yes, the fire is real, but it's trying to portray that he ignited from the lava. He didn't. It was faked.

It's a real photo representing something that isn't real. Saying the headline that says it's fake is wrong is taking a step too far into certainty. I wouldn't say it's wrong, even if the word choice could better represent the truth. That's my point. I'm not arguing it is fake, but that calling it fake isn't necessarily incorrect.