"actual image" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to a physical or visual representation of something, such as a photograph or illustration. For example, "We just received some actual images of the new product, and they look great!".
"They're actors that are moving around, and then they lay the actual image of the Velociraptors over the top of these people, so there actually are people for the actors to act against".
Would viewing the actual image improve my academic work, and if I viewed one image would viewing other similar images improve my work further?
The challenge is to correct details in a copy of the museum painting on the iPhone so that it matches the actual image.
This means that when people post a photo from Instagram to Twitter, only a link will be displayed rather than the actual image.
Mailer quickly takes the notion elsewhere, but the core of the idea remains, that the image that matters in a movie isn't the metaphorical public image of the performer but the actual image itself.
A device like the Magic Book would instead permit people to handle an actual image of the data, like an image of what lies beneath a particular oil field.
Software developed by Sarnoff allows the main computer controlling the on-screen action to do only a portion of the actual image processing before sending the problem off, as a highly compressed data file, to the screens.
The episode, "Cartoon Wars: Part 2," parodied "Family Guy," "The Simpsons" and the Muhammad newspaper cartoon controversy (without an actual image of Muhammad, as Comedy Central would not show one).
As McPhee and Orenstein point out, we still think of Napoleon Bonaparte as being unusually short; he wasn't, but James Gillray's wickedly funny etchings of him as a tiny, glaring dandy in an oversize hat permanently eclipsed his actual image.
And mental images seem downright paradoxical: people with vivid visual imaginations may report having images of a cow jumping over the Moon, for example, but no one supposes that there is an actual image of this sort in anyone's brain.
