Photoshopped or Not???

April 2004: This image, which was widely circulated on the Internet, shows a U.S. Marine posing for a photo with two Iraqi children while holding a sign reading "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad then he knocked up my sister". Boudreaux claims that this image was tampered with from the original, in which the sign read "Welcome Marines". A military investigation into potential wrong-doing was inconclusive. It remains unclear if this image is authentic.

GW Bush Photoshop

March 2004: This political ad for George W. Bush, as he was running for President, shows a sea of soldiers as a back drop to a child holding a flag. This image was digitally doctored by copying and pasting, from this original photograph, several soldiers to digitally remove Bush from a podium. After acknowledging that the photo had been doctored, the Bush campaign said that the ad would be re-edited and re-shipped to TV stations.

Infamous Jane Fonda/John Kerry Photoshop

February 2004: This digital composite of Senator John Kerry and Jane Fonda sharing a stage at an anti-war rally emerged during the 2004 Presidential primaries as Senator Kerry was campaigning for the Democratic nomination. The picture of Senator Kerry was captured by photographer Ken Light as Kerry was preparing to give a speech at the Register for Peace Rally held in Mineola, New York, in June 1971. The picture of Jane Fonda was captured by Owen Franken as Fonda was speaking at a political rally in Miami Beach, Florida, in August 1972.

Photo-Journalism Done Wrong

April 2003: This digital composite of a British soldier in Basra, gesturing to Iraqi civilians urging them to seek cover, appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times shortly after the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. Brian Walski, a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times and a 30-year veteran of the news business, was fired after his editors discovered that he had combined two of his photographs to "improve" the composition.

A Leg to Stand On

A Leg to Stand On: "

I vould just like to say, vee have not let osteoporsis and missing limbs hold us back from dream of successful career in Russian modeling.



Thanks Melissa.



Original can be found here.

****Click to reveal disaster****

The model standing up in the background is missing a leg

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Lola Dupre's strange photomontage portraits

Lola Dupre's strange photomontage portraits: "





Scotland-based artist Lola Dupre cuts up photographs and collages the snips into mind-bendingly weird and witty deformed portraits. She is a master of scissors, glue, and surrealism. Hi-Fructose posted an interview with Dupre and includes shots of the cutting room floor too. From Hi-Fructose:

First an image for manipulation has to be selected and sometimes this is what takes most of my time. Going into a project I often have a very fixed idea of what I want to work with: finding the image with the right background, foreground, resolution, and content can take all day sometimes! I usually search Google images for sources, or alternatively I scan images that myself or my contacts have.

When I have selected the right image to use, I crop and print this at various sizes and edits on various sizes of paper. Working like this, the only limitation is the resolution of the source image. I am currently planning to do some giant paste up art works on buildings and walls, and this requires just the same formula but slightly tweaked...

Originally I would cut up perhaps two or three images or work from a small handful of duplicates. But with time my technique has developed and now I need more! This is just technique development - like how a young painter might begin work with just a few colours of poster paints and one large brush, and years later they are working with multiple colours and honed techniques to blend and create with all the experiences they have learned through practice and exploring their medium.

For me, I take a certain delight in the ready-made colour schemes and the detail of the images I work from.

Lola Dupre interview





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Photos: Hex Hitler party, 1942

Photos: Hex Hitler party, 1942: "


From LIFE:

'On the wet windy evening of January 22, a youthful band of idealists went to a lonely cabin in the Maryland woods.' Thus begins one of the odder stories LIFE magazine ever published -- a straightforward, tongue-nowhere-near-cheek account of a 1942 'hex party' convened with one aim in mind: 'to kill Adolf Hitler by voodoo incantation.' According to LIFE, the party, held six short weeks after Germany, Italy, and Japan declared war on the United States, featured 'a dressmaker's dummy, a Nazi uniform, nails, axes, tom-toms and plenty of Jamaica rum,' and was inspired by a book by occultist and writer William Seabrook that was popular at the time: Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today.

Putting A Hex On Hitler, 1942




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Not Even the Beatles Can Escape Photoshop

The original copy of the Beatles Abbey Road album cover shows Paul McCartney, third in line, holding a cigarette. United States poster companies have airbrushed this image to remove the cigarette from McCartney's hand. This change was made without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records, which owns the rights to the image. "We have never agreed to anything like this," said an Apple spokesman. "It seems these poster companies got a little carried away. They shouldn't have done what they have, but there isn't much we can do about it now."

Kate Winslet's Photoshop Diet

January 2003: Sorry, don't have an original of this image, but this cover of GQ magazine featured a digitally slimmed actress Kate Winslet. Winslet herself said that the retouching was "excessive." "I don't look like that and more importantly I don't desire to look like that. I can tell you that they've reduced the size of my legs by about a third", said Winslet. The magazine editor responded:

"These days you only get two kinds of pictures of celebrities - paparazzi pictures or pictures like these which have been highly styled, buffed, trimmed and altered to make the subject look as good as is humanly possible."

Photoshop Dentist

December 1997: Here is another Newsweek/Time blunder, similar to the OJ Simpson case.  This digitally altered photograph of Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine shortly after Bobbi gave birth to septuplets. This photograph was manipulated from the original that appeared, unaltered, on the cover of Time magazine. Newsweek manipulated the photograph to make Bobbi's teeth straighter, and were accused of trying to make her "more attractive".

LIFE magazine on "LSD Art," 1966

LIFE magazine on "LSD Art," 1966: "





From the LIFE magazine September 9, 1966 cover story about psychedelic art:

'Amid throbbing lights, dizzying designs, swirling smells, swelling sounds, the world of art is 'turning on.' It is getting hooked on psychedelic art, the latest, liveliest movement to seethe up from the underground.'

More LIFE images from that story and the 1960s psychedelic culture

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Ulysses S. Grant

Here is another great example of early image manipulation. This heroic looking guy is Ulysses S. Grant, US general of the Union Army during the American Civil War. The image is supposed be showing him with his troops at City Point, Virginia. But it was discovered that Grant was not in that location and was not even photographed on a horse.

(1) the head was taken from a portrait; (2) the horse and body is from a photo of Alexander M. McCook; and (3) the background is of a confederate prison camp.

Louis Vuitton: When mirrors get it wrong

Louis Vuitton: When mirrors get it wrong: "

Whose that in the mirror? I'm so confused....

Thanks Rafael!

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Content Aware Fill - Not Just in Photoshop Anymore...

This is the craziest thing that I have seen, maybe ever.... This video software removes elements live and on the fly. The program called Diminished Reality is still in its earliest versions, it will be really interesting to see how this is used. I have a feeling it will become an "app" the people can play with on their phones, but it could have better uses - like removing background elements from film shoots that would otherwise be an expensive post production step. Of course, it can easily be used mischievously by "news" organizations...

Water To Blood - How Severe Do You Rate This Image Alteration?

November 1997: After 58 tourists were killed in a terrorist attack at the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor Egypt, the Swiss tabloid Blick digitally altered a puddle of water to appear as blood flowing from the temple. On the surface it does not seem like a big manipulation, the color is changed across the whole image, just a simple color cast change. How do you feel about this kind of image manipulation?

Can you spot who doesn't belong???

Can you spot who doesn't belong??? In this 1960 Olympic photograph the US Team had just defeated the Soviet Union but three of the team's players did not stick around long enough to get into the shot. So they just pasted their faces over three less important players I guess...

Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding - Coming Together Digitally

February 1994: This digital composite of Olympic ice skaters Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan appeared on the cover of New York Newsday. The picture showed the rivals practicing together, shortly after an attack on Kerrigan by an associate of Harding's husband. The picture caption reads: "Tonya Harding, left, and Nancy Kerrigan, appear to skate together in this New York Newsday composite illustration. Tomorrow, they'll really take to the ice together."

Oprah's head on a white woman's body - 10 years off

This August 1989 cover of TV Guide used a photo of Ann Margret with Oprah's head pasted on... Didn't Oprah's weight used to change all the time? I cannot remember if she was fat or thin in 1989, plus I was only 6. Maybe that is why they elected to use a different body though.

How to move the Pyramids...

National Geographic had a horizontal photo of the pyramids in Egypt and wanted to make a vertical cover from it. They put the photo in a computer and squeezed the pyramids together - a difficult task in real life but an easy task for the computer. They referred to it as the "retroactive repositioning of the photographer," (one of the great euphemisms of our age) saying that if the photographer had been a little to one side or the other, this is what he would have gotten. The photographer was not 10 feet to the right and he did not get the photo they wanted so they created a visual lie.

I can ride a horse and swing a sword, but I need a little help....

In order to create a more heroic portrait of himself, Benito Mussolini had the horse handler removed from the original photograph. This photograph is from 1942.

Analog Photoshop - How do they do that?

In the comments since I have been posting some historical image manipulations it seems like a lot of people have been asking about how images were edited before the electronic age. No, I don't think it was much like this image above - but I am doing some research and hope to post some kind of guide or tutorial in the near future!

Kim Jong-Il digitally inserted with troops

Here is one of the alleged Kim Jong-Il photoshops that I was able to find. This was released in late 2008 by the state run media of the DPRK and later questioned by the BBC. Do you think it is a fake?

Another Trick by Mao

In this photo from 1976 the so called "gang of four" were removed for a memorial ceremony for Mao. Not long ago there was much speculation the Kim Jung Il had either died or was seriously ill - the North Korean government press was accused of manipulating images of the dictator into recent photographs to trick everyone into thinking he was ok. I'll have to look for some of those images to post.