Another Magazine Cover

Here is another case a photo being manipulated for a magazine cover.  This model who was 5'10 and 120 pounds was drastically altered for the Ralph Lauren magazine cover.

 

This makes me think of how people have breed bulldogs so selectively to have wide shoulders and narrow hips that now most females are unable to give birth naturally and have to have puppies via c-section.  The ideal is just wholly unnatural and impractical.  Is that the ideal we want for ourselves as well?

The color of OJ

OJ Simpson's mug shot was on the cover of a few magazines right after his arrest.  Most remembered was TIME's decision to drastically darken the original image.  In contrast NEWSWEEK ran a version that was much truer to the original.

I think that there were some cries of racism (making the suspected murderer black man blacker), and also just pointing out that darkening the photo was like calling OJ guilty.  What is the difference between darkening a photo and erasing elements from it?  Is this less manipulated than my earlier post of the smoking city just becase no shapes or textures were added, only the origianl pixels were shifted in color?  What do you think?

Distorting Reality

My earlier post about Obama and the oil well made me remember this older news story from 2006.  Reuters got into some hot water for circulating this image of an F16 firing missiles over Lebanon.  As it turned out the jet is actually defensive flares used to decoy surface to air missiles.  On closer inspection only one flair was even dropped - apparently the clone stamp was used to create the additional "missiles."  Reuters responded by cutting off the freelance photographer who submitted the image and removed his previous contributions from their archive. 

In a similar gaffe Reuters also accepted an image that to me looks clearly (and poorly) photoshopped.  The smoke was duplicated the make the damage in this photograph from the Mid East look worse.

Obviously Shopped

I wonder what someone would have said if they had seen images like this 100 years ago, or even just 50.  Cameras were around, but everyone assumed that the images they created were a documentation of reality.  How do seeing things like this now effect us?  Does it hurt our sense of wonder?

Accidentally...the whole leg!

 

 

Don't know what was being advertised here, maybe some kind of limb re-attachment procedure?

When Editorializing changes Reality

The original image appears on the right.  The cropping takes out the boom that Obama is examining on the shore.  The effect created is that his head is hung in sorrow or defeat.  The crop itself creates a strong effect, and would be seen by most people I think as "fair play."  By taking the woman out of the image it removes the original from reality altogether.  It isolates the president in a slumping, isolated pose - a moment that may have ever happened.  At this point the editor may have just as well replaced the background image with a shot of the burning well.  It would not have been much further of a leap...

CS5 - Content Aware Fill

If you have not worked with the latest version of photoshop them you may not have heard of the new content aware fill. It is almost scary the things that you can do with it. It is like a bigger and badder spot healing brush. Take a look at this demonstration video where they remove an entire tree in one click. It gets even scarier when they use content aware to fill in the edge pixels to extend canvas size. I wonder how long it will be before photoshop is a one-click program? If it is making all the decisions for the user then why will designers and image editors even be needed? We might be one step closer to skynet gaining consciousness...