Fat Fake Fotos

Much comment going on right now on Little Green Footballs about an obviously faked up photo released by Reuters. Here's a screengrab.



Click here to see the screengrab at full size.

The image in question contains areas that have been rather obviously added using a PhotoShop tool called Clone.

This enables a touch-up artist to copy patches of an original shot and paste them quickly onto other areas of the picture. It's a useful tool for dabbing away dust and scratches from scanned hard copy pics or touching up digital photos.

For instance, you might have a good pic of a car spoiled by mud on a tyre sidewall. You simply select an area of clean sidewall and clone it over the mud spatter. Or you might have had a pimple on your chin when you had your wedding photos taken. One clone and it's gone!

Of course, the artist has to be careful not to make the edges of the cloned area too obvious and not repeatedly clone areas that are already somewhat repetitive in nature. In the Reuters photo, it is clear that the upper left edge of the smoke cloud is the originating element.

And whoever did the work on the Reuters shot either didn't know what they were doing or, as I suggest in the LGF comments, was sending a (smoke) signal that suggests they were working under duress. Difficult as it may be to believe, not all journalists and photographers appreciate being instructed by their editors to lie.

Nora suggests the beat up merchant may actually be the photographer, Adrian Hajj, seeking to file a more spectacular image than was the truth in order to guarantee its use and his paycheck. If this is the case, Hajj should stick to pressing the shutter button and leave PhotoShop to the experts.

It took a mere 20 seconds while leaning over Nora's shoulder to add a little more 'impact' to the photo to demonstrate how the inept use of the clone tool created that obvious 'step and repeat' pattern in the Reuters image.



It actually took longer to upload my further faked photo to Flickr and obtain its URL for linking than it did to doctor the image to this amateurish standard.

The big question, of course, is why on Earth would Reuters want to make a picture of Beirut buildings burning after an Israeli airstrike look worse than it was?

Silly question.

File it under another example of 'fake but true'. After all, the photo would really have looked like this if the Israelis has fired one of their secret PhotoShop tipped missiles.

-- Nick

UPDATE: Game, set and match.

UPDATE II: From photo manipulation to media manipulation.

UPDATE III: Fame at last. Michelle Malkin gets a chuckle out of my pic above.