Day 1,724: speck, hue, spurious, tint

A mark caused by a hair on the lens or a speck of dust in the camera can be removed from an image. Overexposure, which washes out the subject, or an odd hue can be adjusted. That can sometimes lead to spurious criticism. In 2011 Hir TV, a Hungarian channel, accused The Economist of portraying Viktor Orban, the country’s prime minister, unfavourably after we published a photograph of him cropped to fit the width of our print columns and edited to remove a yellow tint.

What is photo retouching and when is it permissible?

Artwork of the day 
Those Specks of Dust
Francisco Goya
Original Title: Aquellos polbos
Date: 1799
Style: Romanticism
Series: Los caprichos
Genre: caricature
Media: aquatint, etching,paper
Location: Private Collection
Dimensions: 21.5 x 15.5 cm

Word of the day 
speck: a very small mark, piece, or amount:
hue: (a degree of lightness, darkness, strength, etc. of) a colour:
spurious: false and not what it appears to be, or (of reasons and judgments) based on something that has not been correctly understood and therefore false:
tint: a small amount of a colour:

Quote of the day
“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road