Was it dark blue, as millions of television viewers saw Woods' hat as they watched him secure the PGA Championship on its final day? Or was the cap light blue, as it appeared in a five-column photo of Woods, fist pumping, on the front page of Monday's Sports section in The News & Observer?

"You should also be concerned about N&O photo errors," Hank Cockrell of Raleigh wrote me. "Is there a valid excuse for the Page 1D showing Woods in a blue golf cap and on Page 4D showing him in a (correctly colored) black cap?"

Actually, it was navy blue. I doubt if Woods cared what color the cap came out in photos, as long as they showed the Nike Swoosh for which he is so handsomely compensated. (They did). But the pictures did raise a good question about the reality of the photos you see in The N&O and other newspapers.

Photo accuracy has become another of the credibility issues lately swirling about the newspaper business. Earlier this month, the Reuters news agency acknowledged that a regular photo contributor in the Middle East had doctored photos of Lebanon war coverage. One shot added an additional plume of smoke to burning buildings in Beirut. Another had more missiles dropping from an attacking Israeli fighter jet than actually were fired. In fact, they weren't even missiles, as the photographer's caption indicated, but flares.

Closer to home, a photographer for The Charlotte Observer was fired last month after it was discovered that he had added a deep red color to the sky in a sunrise photo of a firefighter on a ladder. It was the photographer's second offense of photo manipulation in three years.

As technology gives newspapers new tools to shoot and reproduce the pictures you see in the paper, it also makes it easy to alter with the click of a computer mouse the reality that the pictures are supposed to portray. Even before digital technology, newspapers had adjusted photos to render them more suitable for printing on low-quality paper with limited ink colors. The trick, especially with computers, is to stay on this side of the line that separates photo correction from manipulation.

The Tiger cap miscue was a problem of technical imprecision, rather than photo retouching. To understand how it happened, we need first a primer in newspaper photo processing.

Digital photography has replaced film, of course. When a photographer finishes an assignment, he or she may make some computer adjustments for light conditions and camera quirks. Then the photo goes to a team of imaging technicians whose job it is to make the picture ready for reproduction on newsprint.

The color palette in a camera is not the same as in printing inks. So the image techs have to adjust the color. They also seek to "bring up" the photo for better reproduction by lightening shadowy areas, brightening highlights, increasing contrast and sharpening the overall picture. If they don't, the picture looks muddy on the printed page. "We're trying to get as much detail as possible," said N&O Imaging Director Herman Spencer. "The most important thing is that we have to give the picture a lot of snap, a lot of sharpness, because the (printing) paper is not white."

That's where the Woods photo went awry. The technician working on that picture, trying to lighten up a dark picture, went too far and washed out the dark tones in the hat. "He was focused on bringing the picture up so it didn't look muddy in the paper," Spencer said. (To view the pictures, go to www.newsobserver.com, keyword: vaden).

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