For years I’ve loved entering the World Press Photo contest for the simple fact that it’s free and you get a free book containing all of the winning photographs just for submitting your entries.  However, the one thing that always kind of annoyed me was the presence of so many overmanipulated photos among the winners.  Overmanipulation is, in some respects, in the eye of the beholder and can take the form of excessive darkening, lightening, oversaturation or tweaking of the colors or exposure of the photograph to the extent that it no longer represents what was truly present when the photograph was taken.  These rules don’t apply to photo illustrations which can be a mixture of photography and any level of tweaking by available photo editing programs.

The organizers of the World Press Photo competition have recently added a new rule to curb any alterations of future submissions.  Click here for the rules and scroll down to rule number 15 which states:

The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed. The jury is the ultimate arbiter of these standards and may at its discretion request the original, unretouched file as recorded by the camera or an untoned scan of the negative or slide.