Reuters Admits, Pulls Doctored Photos

fragmentate points to a post on PopPhoto which says "Reuters pulled a photograph of burning buildings in Beirut yesterday after a post on the Little Green Footballs blog outed it as digitally manipulated. The photo, filed on Saturday by freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, ran with the caption "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs." Fragmentate adds "Another image from the same photographer was found to have been doctored. Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."

Comments

Re:Fake or exaggerated?

[mspohr]

If you look at the "before" and "after" photos, you can clearly see that the photographer manipulated it to show more smoke (and did a poor job of "smoke cut and paste"). There was a lot of smoke in the original, so you wonder why he felt he needed to "improve" it.

Reuters says it normally sends all photos to their Singapore office to check for manipulation but this one slipped through. Looks bad but not quite the same level of deception as the hack who put Kerry and Fonda in the same photo during the last election cycle.

Re:Define "exaggerated."

[tgibbs]

If a JPEG image comes out of the camera with very low contrast, why is that the "real" scene and not an incorrect camera setting (contrast turned too low)? And if I then take a low contrast image in GIMP and adjust the contrast for better clarity, why is that a "fake" scene and not the "real" scene that I saw?

This is a bit ingenuous. Even before digital photo manipulation, a clear distinction was recognized between standard darkroom manipulations to adjust brightness, contrast, and color, and "trick photography" such as double exposures (which is analogous with what the photographer was doing with the Photoshop clone tool).

Hezbollah photographer

[Chris Siegler]

The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example and yet another, this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!