The North Korean government is the latest to get caught trying to feed a poorly Photoshopped photo to the media. This past weekend the Korean Central News Agency — a state-run organization — released a photo of citizens trying to wade through floodwaters in Pyongyang, saying that heavy rains flooded farmlands, destroyed homes, and caused deaths. After initially passing the image onto its members, the AP decided to issue a “kill notice” (yup, that’s what it’s called) a day later to withdraw the photo, stating,

The content of this image has been digitally altered and does not accurately reflect the scene [...] No other version of the photo is available.

The problem was the fact that the clothing worn by the people in the photo don’t appear to be wet at all — even where the water meets the pants! It appears the water level was much lower, and the government tried to exaggerate the image, perhaps in an attempt to appeal for international aid.

(via Korea JoongAng Daily via The Click)

The AP has sacked photographer Miguel Tovar for “deliberate and misleading photo manipulation” after Tovar cloned out his own shadow from a feature photograph. The Photoshopping came to light after an alert photo editor spotted a strange looking dust pattern in a photo of Argentinian children playing soccer.
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When Calle Hoglund had his buddies over one night editing a music video, he got the idea of creating a photo manipulation with his friends looking out from photo frames. The project took three hours from start to finish, and luckily for us they created a stop-motion behind-the-scenes video showing how it was done.

Workflow for the Time Lapse: Shot with my 40D every second then uploaded it to Lightroom3 where I cropped them before exporting to Quicktime Player 7 where the Timpe Laps is being made. Finally I added the two Time Lapse movies to Final Cut Pro where I added the pics and music.

It’s a fun glimpse of photographers being creative.

(via f stoppers)

A couple days ago our minds were blown by a diminished reality demonstration showing objects being removed from live video feeds. Today’s mind-blowing video is a demonstration of MovieReshape, an image manipulation program by German researchers that’s going to make it much harder to believe anything our eyes see in future videos. As you can see in the demonstration above, the software allows physical characteristics of a person in a video to be manipulated by simply dragging sliders around.

It’s a pretty interesting — albeit scary — glimpse at where technology is headed.

(via f stoppers)

HBO posted this interesting behind-the-scenes video that gives a glimpse into the kind of special effects that went into filming the popular miniseries John Adams. It’s pretty crazy how they construct entire realities around the actors using CGI.

And you thought Photoshopping was hard…

We’ve all heard of trickery that goes into many kinds of photography to make something look more appealing to consumers, whether it’s a Big Mac at McDonalds or the swimming pool at a motel. Sometimes the discrepancy isn’t worth complaining about, but this wasn’t the case for David Ng (currently a guest blogger over at Boing Boing) when he purchased the Banzai Wild Waves Water Park. He took a photograph of the box art and then a photograph of his two children standing next to the actual inflatable water slide.

What we learn is that the product photographer used tiny children when photographing the slide. Just kidding. Unless the photog actually hired six miniature-yet-perfectly-proportional children as models, this is a pretty nasty case of dishonest photo-manipulation.

Reviewers on Amazon agree, giving the product two out of five stars. Here’s a sample comment:

It is a tiny piece of junk. I know a lot of things are mildly digitally enhanced these days but I have studied the picture and there is just NO way that is the product. I mean I dont know anything about doctoring photos but it is so grossly obvious in this case even a kid could tell. My 3 yr old can barely slide down b/c the other end of the pool is in the way.

At least the box says “product may not be as appears on image”.

(via Boing Boing)

Peter Funch is a New York City-based photographer who we featured a while back in a post titled “4 Creative Projects that Bend the Reality of Street Scenes“. Funch photographs scenes for extended periods of time, and then combines people who share something in common. In the photograph above, he chose to include only people who were carrying manila envelopes. You can see more of his work over at his V1 gallery page.

I recently came across this interesting interview video that gives a neat look at how Funch works and how the images are assembled. The interview itself is in English even though the introduction is not:

We learn that Funch shoots at street corners for 10-15 days at a time, and sometimes plants his tripod in the middle of the street with cars behind him. Interesting.

Image credit: Photograph by Peter Funch

Last week when Reuters released photographs of the volcanic activity at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, one photograph stood out to Wade Laube, the photo editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

After making a few calls, Reuters decided to investigate. Laube writes on his blog,

Reuters had made contact with the photographer, an Icelandic local, and sought access to the original. It transpired that before being acquired by the wire service, the photograph had been in the possession of an Icelandic newspaper and it was there that some fairly liberal digital dodging and burning took place. When a comparison was made with the original, it became obvious that post production had been applied to sufficient extent that it violated Reuters’ very firm position on digital enhancement. So they retracted the picture and supplied the original in its place, and we dropped that image into the Herald for later editions.

Looking at the before and after photographs shown above, you can see that post-processing was done in order to make the plume of ash look extremely dramatic.

What are your thoughts on how far post-processing can go before it becomes too much?

Image credits: Photographs by Reuters

A banner on Andrew Romanoff’s Senate campaign website provoked a bit of an outrage from a minority group when people realized that it was digitally manipulated.

The original photo shows Romanoff, the Democratic candidate from Colorado, at a campaign kickoff.

The photo for the banner was tinted blue, and then had several people from other images spliced into it, presumably in order to make Romanoff look like he was surrounded by more followers. Some of the added people include an African American woman to the right of Romanoff, as well as a Latino American man towards the center of the banner. The photo changes caused some minorities to believe Romanoff was trying to appear like his supporters were more diverse.

The Photoshopped African American woman, Andrea Mosby, told reporters that she has no problem with the photo-tweak, since she supports Romanoff and was at the same rally.

Others disagree on principle. According to the Denver Post, Colorado minority leaders wrote to Romanoff’s campaign, expressing that they were “shocked, disturbed and outraged” that the campaign felt the need to manipulate an image to appear like he had more minority supporters. Some 25 people signed the letter that called the candidate’s integrity into question, saying:

“We are NOT random people to be moved around for aesthetic reasons…We are NOT political pawns to be used when convenient nor do we accept being manipulated and repositioned when it serves one’s political motives…The Photoshopping in of minorities is not acceptable and falls far short of the integrity we expect of candidates running for the US Senate.”

Romanoff’s campaign said that the banner was intended as a photo collage or montage of the event, designed by a volunteer to reflect the overall attendance at the campaign event.

Romanoff later removed the image from the site and issued an apology:

This decision and a description of it have caused offense. I regret that and have removed the montage from our website. I take offense at any suggestion that our campaign attempted to deceive anyone. That’s outrageous and false. I bring a lifetime of commitment to equality and opportunity, and I reject these attacks on my character. I am very proud of the diverse support we’ve already received and continue to earn every day.

(via Denver Post)

World Press Photo has disqualified one of the winners of this year’s contest after concluding that the photographer digitally manipulated his work. The disqualified entry “Street fighting, Kiev, Ukraine”, shot by Stepan Rudik for the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, had won 3rd prize in Sports Features.

This year, for the first time, photographers were required to submit RAW image files if the judges suspected that photographs were manipulated beyond what the rules allowed. The rule states:

The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.

According to the British Journal of Photography, the manipulation involved removing the foot of one of the subjects in a photo.

(via Amateur Photographer)

Update: Stepan Rudik just contacted us with the original photograph and the version he entered in the contest. He says,

Your website gave information about disqualification of my material at the World Press Photo contest. I do NOT argue the decision of the jury.

At the same time, I would like to present the original photograph, from which it is clear that I haven’t made any significant alternation nor removed any important informative detail. The photograph I submitted to the contest is a crop, and the retouched detail is the foot of a man which appears on the original photograph, but who is not a subject of the image submitted to the contest. I believe this explanation is important for my reputation and good name as a reportage photographer. I’d like this picture to be published.

Here is the photograph in question:

It was actually a crop of the following photograph:

It wasn’t the crop, nor the post-processing, that caused the photograph to be disqualified, but the removal of the portion of the foot that is visible between the thumb and fingers of the hand being bandaged. We’ve cropped it ourselves here (Hover your mouse over the image to compare it to the version Rudik submitted):

Do you think the disqualification was justified? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Image credit: Photograph by Stepan Rudik