Would it be unethical to publish this image?

I'm a field-based structural geologist/metamorphic petrologist. I try to sort out when rocks were squashed or heated or buried or cooled, and use that timing to make arguments about what happened in the middle or lower crust. And that means that my evidence is often visual: field photos of folded dike, or thin section photos of foliations, or backscatter electron images of minerals frozen in the midst of an ancient chemical reaction.

Back in the day, I used film. I'm not a great photographer, but I learned to develop black and white film to try to get decent images of thin sections. (Then I laid a piece of mylar film over the photomicrograph, sketched the outlines of the minerals with a pen, scanned the drawing, and re-did the entire thing on a computer in Canvas. And published the two images side-by-side.) I also would take many exposures of everything I photographed, because I could never tell what would show up well in the developed film. And backscatter images... those I took using big pieces of polaroid film, and it was hard to guess just what combination of contrast and brightness would work.

Now, I don't do any of that. I've got a little digital camera that I take into the field, a digital camera on our polarizing microscope, and digital images of every mineral I even consider probing. But I may be sloppier as a photographer. A photo might be a bit too dark, or too bright. I leave off the tungsten filter on the microscope, for instance, and then take a set of adjacent pictures, knowing that I can easily splice them together in Photoshop.

When I'm done, my photomicrograph looks like this:



Is it ethical to publish this? It's a doctored image, and an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed says that means that it shouldn't be in a journal.

It's all automatic doctoring, though - I used Photoshop's automated photomerge command to splice the photos together, merged the layers, and used the auto color adjustment to fix the yellow color from the tungsten light. In the olden days, I would have taped photos together into a mosaic, or adjusted the microscope magnification to get the image I wanted. I would have used a tungsten-balanced film (after taking an entire roll of yellow images) to avoid the yellow color. I would have taken multiple exposures to make sure the image was not too bright and not too dark.

And the photo isn't raw data. You, the reader, can't do all the things that I did to make sure I was identifying the minerals correctly. You can't spin the stage and watch the biotite change color. You can't cross the polars and see that the andalusite is grey, and the high-relief mineral (kyanite??) is red. You can't put in the gypsum plate and spin the stage around (though I know you want to). You've got to trust me that the mineral I say is garnet is really black under crossed polarizers.

But you can see some of the things that I want you to see. See the little yellow staurolites? See those white things beside them? Those are pressure shadows... and the garnet doesn't have them. You can see why I think the kyanite has partially replaced the andalusite - and you can tell me whether you've ever seen a texture like that before.

Is it doctored data, an intellectual lie? Or is it an attempt to show you what I see when I look at the rock?