Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 43925
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2025/07/09 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/9     

2006/8/6-10 [Consumer/Camera, Politics/Domestic/RepublicanMedia] UID:43925 Activity:nil
8/6     Blatantly doctored photo of Beirut on yahoo news:
        http://news.yahoo.com/photo/060805/ids_photos_ts/r3101797657.jpg
        \_ 404
        \_ Hmm, they took it down.  It was a Reuters photo, there are
           small cropped versions here.
           http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html
           \_ Here's a link to the first draft:  http://csua.org/u/gmj
        \_ A detailed column about it:  http://csua.org/u/gmk
        \_ After this, Reuters is no longer accepting work from that
           photographer.  It's stupid, because the altered image actually
           doesn't add anything besides looking fake:
        \_ Reuters is no longer accepting work from that photographer.
           It's stupid, because the altered image actually doesn't add
           anything besides looking fake:
           http://www.leftandright.us/index.php/site/reuters_faking_photos
        \_ That is a totally bogus assertion.  How dare you accuse someone
           of doctoring, altering, or spinning something to further a
           political agenda?!?  -Michael Moore & Ann Coulter
           \_ Of course there's no difference between two paid political
              hacks making big bucks being annoying and a news service used
              around the world that is supposed to have "journalistic
              integrity", but I wouldn't expect a motd troll to "get" this.
              \_ Oh, like when Michael Moore suggested that the best way to
                 deal with a conservative is with a baseball bat, or when
                 Michael Moore endoresed the assasination of public figures
                 he dissagreed with?  Oh, wait, that never happened.   I hate
                 Michael Moore, but you, sir, are a fucking idiot.
                 \_ What does MM have to do with Reuters spreading Hezbollah
                    propaganda verbatim?  Nothing.  I was going to ask wth
                    you're talking about but it really doesn't matter.  Carry
                    on with your nuttitude.
                    \_ What is your definition of "spreading"?  When is a full
                       retraction and apology enough?
                       \_ The same definition as everyone else uses.  A full
                          retraction and apology is quaint and some what cute.
                          How about they stop serving up Hezbollah propaganda
                          as unvarnished truth and actually, ya know, maybe
                          investigate something and stop showing severe bias?
                          Then they'd have nothing to apologise for.  Trust
                          is earned, not granted and they've blown it big
                          time on more than one occasion.
2025/07/09 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/9     

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Cache (2766 bytes)
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html
The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage. The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors. Reuters withdraws doctored image In the message, Reuters said that "photo editing software was improperly used on this image. A corrected version will immediately follow this advisory. Ignored Israeli war deaths go largely unnoticed / Yaakov Lappin Hours after mother and two daughters are killed in Hizbullah rocket attack, media outlets around world fail to report deaths; Full Story Reuters' head of PR Moira Whittle said in response: "Reuters has suspended a photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to a photograph showing smoke billowing from buildings following an air strike on Beirut. Reuters takes such matters extremely seriously as it is strictly against company editorial policy to alter pictures." "As soon as the allegation came to light, the photograph, filed on Saturday 5 August, was removed from the file and a replacement, showing the same scene, was sent. The explanation for the removal was the improper use of photo-editing software," she added. wrote : "This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop "clone" tool to add more smoke to the image." News version of photo (Photo: Reuters) Johnson added: "Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. Speaking to Ynetnews, Johnson said: "This has to cast doubt not only on the photographer who did the alterations, but on Reuters' entire review process. If they could let such an obvious fake get through to publication, how many more faked or 'enhanced' photos have not been caught?" The close ups do appear to show exact replicas of buildings appearing next to one another in the photograph. but it looks so obvious that I don't know how the photographer could have gotten away with it," wrote one user. After further research, Johnson posted a photograph he says is the original image taken before distortions were made, showing much lighter smoke rising. site=104564+space=0824+page='308 2'+size=268x235+position=t2+rnd=(290482141680412711)+linktarget='_blan k' The Hot Air blog also looked at the photo, describing the image as "the worst Photoshop I have ever seen." "A photographer who would blatantly falsify an entire 'news' image would certainly not be above posing and staging photographs of rescue workers," Johnson concluded.
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csua.org/u/gmj -> littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21966_Doctored_Beirut_Photo-_the_First_Draft&only
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csua.org/u/gmk -> theshapeofdays.com/2006/08/adnan_hajj_isnt_even_trying_anymore.html
More of the best of * Tip Jar This site does not accept advertising. Click here to make a generous donation * Gifts A little something in the mail is a fine way to show your appreciation. Adnan Hajj isn't even trying anymore Adnan Hajj is a prolific photojournalist -- and I'm using that term loosely here -- for Reuters who came under some pretty intense criticism in the wake of the recent incident at Qana in Lebanon. a somber photo credited to Hajj appeared on the Reuters news wire showing a Lebanese rescue worker removing the body of a child from the rubble of a collapsed building. Both Hajj and Frayer had other photos of the same rescue worker and child on their respective wires that day, photos taken at widely divergent times ranging from 12:45 pm Eastern to 4:30 pm Eastern. Now, the fact that these photos appear to have been taken over a span of nearly four hours isn't necessarily damning. Timestamps can be recorded erroneously, editorial assistants can mis-type information when submitting photo to the wire service. There are a lot of ways in which this seemingly bizarre sequence of photos could have ended up being distributed to news outlets around the world. But the whole situation contributed to some very skeptical attitudes on the part of a lot of folks who look at the press critically these days. Were these photographers actually recording the events as they took place? Or was the body of a child being paraded in front of the cameras all afternoon in an attempt by one party or another to influence public opinion? And if the photos were staged, why the hell were these photographers -- these journalists -- letting themselves be used that way? It made for a lot of thought-provoking talk, but nothing conclusive came of it. It was just another example of the fog of war in the real-time age. But tonight, as far as I'm concerned, all the benefit of the doubt is gone. a photograph on the Reuters wire that purports to show "smoke billowing from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs." Except the smoke has been so obviously and incompetently retouched that I'm amazed Hajj ever believed he could get away with it. See the repeating patterns in the smoke in the top third of the picture, the way it looks textured in a regular way? The fact that Treasury has, in the past, issued two-dollar bills really isn't relevant tot his conversation. For your comfort and safety, please feel free to substitute whatever you want in place of the last three words of that sentence. Adobe Photoshop has a tool that pretty much all artists and photographers adore and revile in equal proportion. It's called the clone stamp tool, and basically what it lets you do is take pixels from over there and put them over here. Used wisely it's a good tool for, for example, airbrushing out specks of dust or scratches on film. But no matter how a Photoshop newbie might be tempted by it, it is not a good tool to use for replicating large areas of a photograph. Because all you can do is take a piece of the picture and reproduce it someplace else, it's very easy to introduce subtle patterns into a photo, especially in the background, that the eye can pick up on. If somebody overuses the clone stamp tool, you won't necessarily be able to pinpoint exactly what the problem is, but you'll know something is off. By all appearances, it looks like Adnan Hajj used the clone stamp tool about sixty-three zillion times to paint more smoke into the sky above Beirut. There are a couple other peculiarities in the photo that jump out to my eye, including a couple of conspicuously similar patterns of pixels -- that's "buildings" to you non-geek types out there -- in the lower left. But I spent a few minutes zoomed in real tight and couldn't be sure that I was seeing something artificial. Frankly, compared to the unbelieveably clumsy work in the sky, the retouching in the lower left -- if that's indeed what it is -- is incongruously subtle. So I'm willing to pass that off as two similar-looking buildings in downtown Beirut for now. The sky is such a dead giveaway, I'm frankly shocked that this photo ever made it out onto the wire at all. "Allah" from Hot Air have all weighed in with their opinions. Some of the other bloggers have taken a closer look at that bottom-left quadrant of the photo I mentioned, and come to the conclusion that yeah, that's been retouched too. I find their analysis persuasive, but I have to wonder: If Adnan Hajj could make that part of the photo look at least superficially genuine, how could he screw up the rest of the picture so horribly? Update #2 A reader e-mailed to ask what I was talking about with respect to the patterns-in-the-smoke stuff up above. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to explain it, so I'll just show you what I mean instead. See how the same pattern repeats itself nine times on the right side of the picture? That's because I swiped across it with the clone stamp tool, just painting in the same pattern of pixels to fill in the right side of the photo. It's careless, and it's phony, and it's obviously careless and phony. Charles thinks this photo is a retouched version of an entirely different picture taken by another photographer. Seems more likely to me that it was just taken from the same vantage point. Again, if the photographer (or whomever) could do such a great job of airbrushing the bottom half, why did he do such a terrible job up top? I think it's more likely he started with a photo showing some smoke over some buildings, and wanted more smoke. Death and destruction aren't funny at all, even when the death and destruction in question are entirely the products of a twisted Internet blogger person. I, on the other hand, am already going straight to hell, so it doesn't really matter if I giggle a bit on the way down. Digg, and that one of the people who left a comment there said that it's all gonna come down to how Reuters responds. Of course, Digg is a site where just anybody can sign up to leave a comment, which means you also get to see things like this: "I can't stand the nerve of Israelis to accuse someone of adding smoke to a picture when they already killed hundreds of innocent civilians. Is it just me, or is that just "fake but accurate" wrapped up in a new set of clothes? Folks, I hate to break this to you, but it really doesn't matter very much now what happened in Beirut. Now the story is that a photojournalist -- or his editor, or whomever it turns out to be -- faked a photo, and that Reuters ran it on their wire. Once you start just making stuff up, the argument is over. Very few things in this life can be reduced to objective truth. But deciding whether it was good or bad, whether it was okay or not, that's a value judgment. And most folks have a deep-seated resistance to being persuaded by people who lie. But it doesn't look like the new photo is an unedited version of the original photo. Instead, it looks like the two pictures were taken seconds, or even fractions of a second, apart. I superimposed the pictures in Photoshop and found that not only do they cover slightly different fields of view, they also were taken at different angles. The result of all this is that it doesn't seem to be possible to extract the difference between the photos to highlight precisely what portions were retouched. Normally if you retouch a photo and then superimpose it on top of the original, you can subtract the two pictures from each other -- literally, like with math. The result is entirely black except for the parts of the photo you retouched. Here's the difference matte between the retouched photo and the original. But even after I carefully superimposed the two Reuters pictures, the difference matte I got was not useful, due in no small part to the fact that, if these are two different crops of the same photo, one's been color-corrected differently from the other. It looks like Adnan Hajj -- or somebody -- copied the entire foreground of the photo and pasted it in, maybe in a clumsy attempt to extend the cityscape and make the photo more (profitable) dramatic. Just to see what happened, I pu...
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www.leftandright.us/index.php/site/reuters_faking_photos
That's not the only thing that repeats: Here is a close-up of the lower-left corner of the same photo.