“If non-TTG manipulations were allowed by TTG, they would quickly be taken to crazy extremes.”

It is not difficult to imagine “extreme” scenarios for any non-TTG manipulations, especially when bearing in mind that TTG is never device-dependent:

Every change that TTG allows to be performed on a smartphone is also allowed to be performed with a standalone camera and a computer running a program like Photoshop — which greatly increases the capability of carrying manipulations to an extreme.

Two examples of “carrying non-TTG manipulations to an extreme”:

1. Adding non-optical bokeh blur:

It would be easy to take a “team photo” (of a sports team) and then, in a program like Photoshop, radically blur out all but one of the faces “Because technically speaking, everyone's face was a different distance from the camera.”

2. Doing non-optical perspective correction (by reshaping things in the photo so that it looks like the camera was pointed somewhere that it was not):

A photographer could stand on the street at the base of a 100-story skyscraper, with a very wide-angle lens, and point their camera almost straight up at the sky so that the entire building is in the frame—

— and then the photographer could, using a program like Photoshop, “correct” the verticals (so that there are no converging lines in the photo).

Photographers can always do whatever they want to their own photos.

But if TTG allowed the kinds of images described above to qualify for the TTG label, the public would quickly stop looking to TTG to identify trustworthy photographs.