By John Seewer The Associated Press

TOLEDO – A staff photographer for The Blade who digitally altered a front-page photo has resigned, the newspaper said yesterday.

Allan Detrich, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, had told Blade editors that he altered a photo of an Ohio college baseball team for his personal files and mistakenly sent it to the newspaper.

The photo showed Bluffton University players kneeling March 30 at their first game after a bus crash killed five players in Atlanta. Photos of the team in other Ohio newspapers showed the legs of someone standing in the background. The legs did not appear in The Blade photo, taken from a similar angle.

Detrich resigned Saturday, a day after he was suspended by the newspaper, said Blade spokeswoman Luann Sharp.

new business and had been planning to leave the newspaper.

“I’m going to enjoy my life with my family,” he said yesterday. “I’ll be glad I’m out of the news business.”

He began working for The Blade in 1989 and has worked for The Advertiser-Tribune in Tiffin and The Xenia Daily Gazette. He was a Pulitzer finalist in feature photography in 1998 for a series of photos of children who fled abusive parents.

The Blade is reviewing other photos taken by Detrich and published in the newspaper, Sharp said.

“We owe it to our readers to complete a thorough review in order to determine if there have been any other photos that were altered prior to publication,” she said.

The Associated Press has removed access to 50 images created by Detrich from AP’s photo archive.

The Blade, owned by Block Communications Inc., has a circulation of 135,000 on weekdays and 180,000 on Sundays