Advertising Standards Authority, the ad industry watchdog in the UK, has banned an advertisement by Lancome featuring Julia Roberts for being misleading, stating that the flawless skin seen in the photo was too good to be true. Parliament member Jo Swinson first brought the ads to the authority’s attention, and later told the BBC:

This ruling demonstrates that the advertising regulator is acknowledging the dishonest and misleading nature of excessive retouching. Pictures of flawless skin and super-slim bodies are all around, but they don’t reflect reality.

This comes about a month after the American Medical Association called upon ad agencies to stop the “altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image”.

(via NYDailyNews)

Thanks for sending in the tip, Harry!

Image credit: Photographs by David Shankbone and Lancome

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)

Government officials have been caught in a number of Photoshop flubs recently, from the Egyptian president being edited to be walking at the head of a pack of world leaders to a badly Photoshopped photo of Chinese officials that went recently went viral. Now the Syrian government may be the latest culprit — the country just released an image of its president swearing in a newly appointed governor, and something doesn’t quite look right…

The Guardian’s imaging expert David McCoy believes two pictures have been merged to make it seem like the men are in the same room, with the one on the right positioned fractionally higher than the one on the left. This becomes clearer when you look closely at the floor, which is distorted. The right hand side of the picture has been stretched downwards into place to line up with the left side (which is not distorted). [#]

What’s your analysis? Is this this yet another government manipulated photo?

(via The Guardian)

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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Earlier this week an Internet user in China visited their county government website and was greeted with a horribly Photoshopped photograph showing three government officials inspecting a road. The caption read,

County mayor Li Ningyi and vice-mayor Tang Xiaobing are inspecting the newly constructed country road at Lihong Town.

When governments or corporations do a bad job at image manipulation and get caught, the photos often go viral get remixed all over the Internet — see BP’s helicopter incident — and this case was no exception. The photo immediately spread across forums, and Photoshop users began creating image showing the three officials in all kinds of random situations.
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The Canon EOS-0 is what you get at the Apocalypse when all the major camera, software, and operating system companies get together to unleash unspeakable evil into the world. It’s a camera with a little bit of everything: support for every major lens mount, a drive for various kinds of discs, Windows Vista as the operating system (shudder), Photoshop available on the giant widescreen LCD, etc… Pretty much the only thing you won’t find on this camera is a toaster.
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Pete Souza’s iconic photo of Obama and his national security team in the Situation Room has become extremely well known in the span of a week, so it’s unlikely that any reputable media outlet would dare alter the photo in any way — but that’s exactly what one newspaper did. Orthodox Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung has a policy of never publishing photographs of women, and decided to publish Obama’s situation room photograph with Hillary Clinton and counterterrorism director Audrey Tomason Photoshopped out of the frame.
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There’s a lot of paranoia when it comes to doing photography in and around airports these days — much to the dismay of plane spotters — but wedding photographer and airplane enthusiast Lynn-Kai Chao came up with a neat way to do airplane photography without worrying the TSA: by using airplane models. Believe it or not, the above photograph is actually a Photoshopped photograph of Chao holding a model airplane.
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Spanish sports daily AS was forced to publish an apology earlier this week over a soccer match photo in which a player was airbrushed out. The photo was of a controversial no-call in which a Barcelona player might have been slightly offsides before receiving the ball and assisting in a goal. In the photograph published by AS, the last defender was removed, making the Barcelona player look clearly offsides.

The apology posted by the paper had the headline “Pedimos disculpas por un error en la infografía del 1-0,” which translates to “We apologise for the error in the computer graphics in the 1-0 incident”. So it seems that while they were adding in the lines and player names explaining the play, the brilliant Photoshop guru accidentally performed some Content Aware Fill mojo on that last defender. Clearly an understandable mistake, wouldn’t you say?

(via Rob Galbraith)

We received a tip from someone in the future the other day. Canon becomes Skynet.