Reply #58: Would you care to hear from a Photoshop "expert?" [View All]

[Atman]

I've been using PS since version 1, and I can fake a picture that would have you convinced your grandma was hang gliding with Arnold Schwarzenegger if you paid me enough.

Your observations about the photo are simply not accurate, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there is no way of telling what "generation" this photo is. I has been copied, posted, e-mailed and re-copied so many times, and each step in the process has the potential to add artifacts to the image.

The halo around Bush's hand are perfect examples. When you compress a photograph for web posting, the .jpg format is almost universal. It is considered a "lossy" compression (as opposed to "loss-less"), which means that when you create the .jpg file, it consolidates like pixels in order to lessen the digital information and thus make the file size smaller, and upload/download faster. There is no way to avoid this. None, except using a very high setting with minimal loss...which no one does for publication on the web, because it completely defeats the purpose of compressing the file in the first place.

ANY photo saved at a normal .jpg setting will exhibit these artifacts.

Second, as to the shadow falling off the back...that is called dodging. It is a photography technique to bring out the important parts of a photo. It's counterpart is called "burning," which does the same thing in reverse. There are Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop. It is done with a little stick or other shield in convention darkroom developing. It is very common in news photos.

As for the capital I's being different...uh, not like we can really tell anyway, but hey...this is handwritten. Bush writes in mixed case, as I often do. So what? I would expect handwritten letters to differ slightly from character to character.

Now please, stop this nonsense. Reuters is a respected news organization, and has everything to lose by publishing a fake photo like this. Everything.



Just ask Dan Rather.