From Halopedia, the Halo wiki
October 7, 2023
Sent a message to BaconShelf
In general, we try to avoid doing heavy alterations of the image source material as to ensure that there isn't any doubt on a reader's end that the source material is a legitimate image from an official work - usually in conjunction with image sourcing URLs. One thing that's fairly important for us is to avoid editing original materials, as to ensure the site can be trusted to be an accurate source of information (for a text example, when archiving things such as Catalog posts, we never correct any kind of typo or spelling error - as to ensure that there's no doubt we're not making things up or editorialising content).
In the case of the comical book cover edits, those were done by a 343 Industries team member and published in a (somewhat) official capacity in an official Halo Waypoint blog, as a comical parody of the official art. Were they to have been published by Haruspis prior to his joining 343, then we wouldn't have them on the site.
Regarding comic panels with captions removed, this is something we used to do on the site a long time ago (and you can probably notice in a lot of older comic images - they have no, or blank, captions on the images). However, some time ago this was scrapped, as removing the text from the image removes the context that the image is placed in which is a fairly important part of the source material.
Hope that clarifies things some further.
Hi. When uploading images, please do not conduct extensive photoshop alterations of the source material. We have extremely rigid image sourcing requirements for images hosted on the site, and it's much appreciated that we do as little custom editing as possible. Thanks.