Well, image editing has become part of the mainstream culture in recent years. The media use image editing software extensively. There's a growing generation of people who have used image editing software for a long time, creating edits of famous figures, products and images for use in commercial projects.
Most of the time, image editing software is far too advanced for certain types of users, and may lead to poor quality editing. Depending on the image, this can raise some questions as to the adgenda of company or entity that produced it. Onb e example would be this incident where Microsoft was localising it's Polish website.
Notice that the African-American man's head has been replaced by a man with light skin, yet the US and Polish versions of the image clearly show a dark-skinned hand.
This led to a lot of concern about Microsoft's practices and attitudes towards race. Microsoft declined to comment when this happened a few years ago, but have since removed the image from their Polish website.
Another example of issues raised by image editing is copyright issues. Any copyrighted images will need clearance in order to be modified and redistributed under copyright law. This includes educational use. Some countries have more relaxed intellectual property laws, for example in the United States of America, one may redistribute copyrighted matierials under fair use (which counts as rewiewing and critique of the material in question). For example, this image:
...is copyright of Apple, but I have edited it into a different image. Theoretically, this image is illegal. I have not requested clearance to use or modify the image and Apple can file lawsuit.
Image editing has been used for nearly 20 years in mainstream computing. Most images available online are edited or tweaked in some respect. It is an artform like other arts, like oil paints, sculpture, or film. Some people use the reality of the photograph to reveal the truth, others conceal it with manipulating images to remove politicians, corrupt leaders, signatures - the list goes on. This concludes my post on legal and ethical issues in the world of computer graphics.
