Just in case anybody sees this: This is completely wrong. Like made-up-out-of-the-guy's-head wrong.
There is no clear-and-bright-line legal test for determining what is transformative and what isn't. That judgment is always made on a case-by-case basis and depends not just on whether the work has been faithfully reproduced but also on the purpose and intent behind the reproduction.
In Perfect 10 v. Google the district court held that Google's creation of low-resolution, but perfectly reproduced, "thumbnail" photographs for the purpose of presenting many small images at once to a computer user was a transformative act, not because it transformed the photographs but because the "thumbnail" images were intended to (and did effectively) serve a fundamentally different purpose from the originals. The act of making and presenting these "thumbnail" images was held to be non-infringing in part because it was transformative. Not all transformative acts are non-infringing.
In the case of Whasisname v. Thatotherguy (oh like you can remember these things off the top of your head) a photographer sued a sculptor for infringement. The sculptor admitted that he used the photographer's (published) photograph as the model for his sculpture, but claimed he'd intended his sculpture to be a parody. The sculpture most likely would have been considered a transformed work, but the court never got that far. The sculptor's affirmative defense of parody was rejected out of hand because the court found that the sculpture was not a parody of the photograph, but was at best a parody of that general type of photograph. Therefore making the sculpture a copy of the photograph was considered an infringement of the photographer's copyright.
Anyway, long story short, anybody who tells you "If you do specific thing X then you are safe from a claim of copyright infringement," at best, has no idea what he's talking about. There are no specific rules to follow. The whole area of law is very situational and impossible to define in objective prima facie terms.