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World Press Photo Winner Accused of Photoshopping
vikingpower writes "The winner of this year's World Press Photo award, Paul l Hanssen, is under fire for allegedly having photoshopped the winning picture. The Hacker Factor is detailing the reasons and technicalities for the accusations. ExtremeTech also runs an item about the possible faking. Upon questions by Australian news site news.com.au, Hanssen answers his photo is not a fake. The whole story, however, is based upon somewhat thin proof: three different times in the file's Adobe XMP block; this does not necessarily mean that more than one file was used in order to obtain a composite image."
Update: 05/14 20:04 GMT by S : World Press Photo says the photo is genuine.
This actually happens more often than you think. Usually the are found out. I remember seeing one example of a poorly clone stamped image where the photographer made the dark clouds from an explosion look bigger. And don't forget Martha-Gate, when they photoshopped her head onto a body model for the cover of Newsweek.
The "photo" looks like it was CGI'd from the ground up. It looks like it was meant to look that way.
It looks like a Final Fantasy cutscreen.
I believe the correct spelling would be Newsweak.
News for people who don't want to know but find People magazine too deep.
No brain, no pain.
I am not agreeing with or denying what Hacker Factor is saying, but I would like to point out some minor issues with the analysis.
First, as to the lighting of the faces being brighter than in other pictures taken during the same procession, it is entirely possible there was a reflective surface to the crowd's right (picture left) which is making the faces appear brighter than one would think they should be in the alley way. Think of the reflective nature of the moon's surface which conspiracy theorists always ignore when talking about how bright things are in shadows. While the Photoshop effect could be the issue, note the wall to their right (picture left) which does have a reflective surface.
Note also the man on the far left, next to the wall. Note how there is sun shining on the white cloth directly below his face. As everyone knows, a white surface reflects large portions of light falling on it which would also produce the lighting effect seen on the man's face.
Second, as to the dirt on the girls face appearing differently in the photos, note the different angles of her head. In the winning photo the forehead is almost at a right angle to the picture taker whereas in the second photo it is pointing almost directly at the camera. The lighting in the second photo is much more diffuse than the first which could explain the difference.
Also note that in the winning photo, the crowd is in a part of the alley which has exposure to much more sunlight than in the second photo.
Again, I'm not saying the person didn't do what has been accused, I'm only pointing out possibilities to explain what is being shown.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake
I was surprised they didn't simply go for "you can tell by the pixels."
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The supposed proof of 'fakery' from the article seems entirely consistent with what the photographer says it is, different regions with different light intensities from the same raw file.The light angles seem entirely plausible, I guess the article writer hasn't heard of reflection. Even the moon landing nutters come up with better stuff than this.
The only true thing is that (as the photographer also says), the light intensities are differing.
Why wouldn't the photographer be allowed to change light intensities? Every single digital image, ever uses some kind of processing to turn photons into pixels on your screen, and there is always some level of subjectivity in how that is done, even if it's done right on the chip. Why is that an issue?
It looks to me as if he went for an HDR treatment of the image, which would also explain the alleged 3 RAW files in it - if he used the same RAW each time but with an altered exposure level to get the dynamic range he wanted.
It's no longer really possible for "normal" people to tell apart real images from photoshopped or even completely CGI rendered ones. Computer imagining has become this good.
What's real? What's fake? Or rather, where does the fake start? Pretty much every ad picture is 'shopped. Models don't "grow" that way. A real human isn't pretty enough for us. And real reality isn't sensationalist enough either.
Get used to fake images being broadcast as news. Thinking about it, you probably already are, you just don't know it yet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Looks brightened up a bit, but not other images thrown in. Can photographers not brighten/tweak contrast on a pic? Posting the original RAW file (if it still exists) would cover him for these sorts of accusations. Wouldn't it be prudent for a news agency to have a backup of the RAW files for A) these sorts of accusations B) their own tweaking of the pic for print/display?
Waiting for an amusing sig.
This photo is supposed to show mourners in Gaza City carrying children who died in an Israeli air strike
No, it really does show mourners in Gaza City carrying children who died in an Israeli air strike. There's no dispute about the factual content. The only dispute is about dramatic enhancement. "Supposed" is an attempt to cast uncertainty about what happened on the ground, when the only uncertainty is how pretty the photographer made it look.
The gritty look on the picture can be achieved with a local contrast filter. Combined with contrast and saturation manipulation, it's pretty easy to do. In Lightroom is just a matter of setting a few sliders - Darks, Highlights, Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation.
Furthermore, the author says he has the RAW file and it was examined by the jury. Personally I know of no software that can currently reverse a jpeg into raw. It should be possible in theory to fake a raw file, but I sincerely doubt it's the case.
Analyzing jpeg artifacts is snake oil. My photo workflow is this: shoot in RAW. Edit in Lightroom. Convert to ProPhoto 16bit/channel. Open in Photoshop, make any fine adjustments if needed. Output to jpeg. Only fools edit and re-save jpegs.
This is simply one of the "fake moon landings" conspiracies, started by people who don't understand photography.
Agree.. it looks like a well done HDR final.
Can't look ,ore photoshoped...
Most photographs I've seen in the recent years were digitally altered in some way.
Especially automatically applied High-dynamic-range Imaging is a quite popular "effect" in current cameras. A side effect of this is that many hobby photographers don't know how to adjust this method properly, or their camera doesn't offer that much options and as a result the colours on their photos seem to be unreal.
But this doesn't mean that the photographs are photoshopped. Digitally altered, yes; photoshopped in the sense of altered content, no.
You can't shoop a 35mm negative.
I was going to say this. Show me a professional photographer who doesn't do at least basic post-production work on his/her pictures.
Life needs more saving throws.
As a retoucher for 20 years, as soon as the image popped open on my screen it was yelling at me... "I've been retouched" The light and it's intensity is all over the place. It maybe the shot the photographer took, but he ruined it with terrible retouching.
Find a job you love, and never work a day in your life.
If Israel started shooting hundreds of unguided rockets into Iran, how long do you think it would be before Iran retaliated? If South Korea shot hundreds of rockets into North Korea would they let it be? If we started shooting rockets into Canada what would happen?
The strong light coming from the left-area is consistent with a bounce flash. The left-most person has a high amount of directed light, while the rightmost does not. The rightmost is also shielded from the potential flash behind the person carrying the right-most child. If a bounce flash wasn't used, then perhaps a strong reflection from the sunlight from an object. Also, if a remote flash unit was used, it may not show on the metadata.
The picture looks processed, but mostly to bring out the shadows and highlights. Not sure what the rules of the photography contest are, but not submitting the original raw is a little suspicious and this whole mess could be cleared up easily by the photographer.
I tend to say it's ok to enhance a press photograph here and there to emphasize or improve the communicated image and message.
This already introduces "enough" bias in a photograph where the photographer decides how this type of postwork will affect the viewer.
The bias is already present as different people see the photographed situation differently and thus would also try to capture the moment differently, according to the way they perceive it. When post-processing their already subjective photograph, their memory serves them in deciding what the photograph still needs to make it fit their memory.
You can see that from the moment the scene is being observed by the photographer to the moment of saving the final press photograph for publication a lot of bias can be introduced.
For me the analysis shows pretty well that adding in different elements from different photos, resulting in normally inexplicable lighting of subjects etc. is crossing a line.
Therefore this photo (or collage, I should say?) should have been disqualified.
It looks like it's be run through lightroom which is what he says he did to it!
If you're not familiar with lightroom, its what professional photographers use to get brightness and depth into photos. It's a set of filters coupled to some workflow and archiving tools. What it isn't is Photoshop editing. He didn't put the dead children into the shot, or composite two separate dead children into one shot.
https://photographyconcentrate.com/15-snazzy-lightroom-and-afters/
Israel really did kill children, they really did die, they really were carried by grieving families along the street. It really is a tragedy, and pretending it's fake, and by implication that the dead children are also fake is a misleading argument.
Because no camera out there captures what your eyes see. Your eyes are the result of millions of years of evolution. DLSRs are the result of, what, 30 years of engineering? HDR was invented not to make unrealistic images but to make images that look like what you'd actually be able to see. It may look fake only because you're used to seeing images on the computer screen which have a "normal" compressed exposure range. Sorta like how when people watch high-framerate images on TV or movies, they complain it looks weird, because they're used to the slower framerate.
Granted, plenty of people go overboard with HDR, and I don't know if the actual scene looked that way.
He does indeed claim he did it with one raw file. "The Hacker" makes a lot of hay about it being loaded/converted three times on two separate dates. Which sorta sounds like the guy is saying "He didn't do it how I would have done it, I can't see a reason to do it how he did it, therefore it must be a fake. To prove it, LIGHTING! Which is based on stuff I can't see."
It reminds me of the people who make reasonable-sounding cases that 9/11 was an inside job. They make it sound questionable until your realize that there are hundreds of other explanations, they have no proof, and they want attention.
How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop
OMG, it was faked! This is an outrage!
... but, from the ExtremeTech article:
When is an image fake, and when is it merely enhanced?
The bigger discussion, of course, is whether Gaza Burial is actually fake — or just enhanced to bring out important details. This is a question that has plagued photography since its inception. Should a photo, especially a press photo, be purely objective? Most people think the answer is an obvious “yes,” but it’s not quite that simple. What if a photo is perfect, except that it’s taken at an odd angle — can you digitally rotate it? What about cropping? What if there’s dust on the lens/sensor/film — can you digitally remove it?
Perhaps most importantly, though, cameras simply don’t capture the same gamut of color or dynamic range as human eyes — a photo never looks the same as the original image perceived by your brain. Is it okay for a photographer to modify a picture so that it looks exactly how he remembers the scene?
So, it wasn't faked, but rather cleaned up? All those people were in those positions at that time? The event was real?
The article uses the word "fake" to discredit the photographer, while at the same time admitting that that determination is really a subjective one having to do with how much enhancement is acceptable, and that the subject of the photo - which photojournalism is really about - is completely real.
It's a well known fact that crowds of greiving Gazans will all simultaneously freeze in their funerals so that photographers can get three good separate exposures for HDR!!! ~
The "photo" looks like it was CGI'd from the ground up. It looks like it was meant to look that way.
Indeed. My first thought was "uncanny valley". The people don't even look real.
Sorry for the AC, more of a lerker.
I've worked in this industry for a *long* time, I have very close personal ties to people who do post-processing for National Geographic.
If this image is faked, it isn't for the reasons listed in the 'analysis' of extremetech, which is clearly just trying to get traffic for their website full of poorly formed editorial.
It isn't uncommon at all to get the RAW file and process it for the highlights, then re-process it for the mid-tones and then re-process it for the shadows. Once you've got all 3 simply blending them together will achieve this result. Nothing more sophisticated than an old fashion darkroom print. It is a way of achieving additional dynamics, very common.
sidenote : I don't like the look of this type of processing as it 'feels' a bit CG, but my feelings don't give me the right to make uninformed slanderous comments about someone's work.
that's why likely it's the same RAW file 'developed' in camera raw for shadows / midtones / highlights and merged in PS with layers/masking to create a good HDR composite.
It really depends from the rules of the contest if the above is acceptable or not, but I don't consider it more cheating than dodging & burning in the darkroom...
-- the cake is a lie
Right. But there's a big difference between enhancing the tones that are already there in a single shot, and compositing from more than one image, or other techniques such as shape distortion.
I have no problem with photo-journalists enhancing the tones of an image. The image still shows an actual scene. It might change the feel of an image but it doesn't change the facts that the image shows. I'd rather see an image where I can see the details than one where I can't because the exposure needed for different parts of the picture were different.
I'd have a big problem if they were compositing. But there's no evidence of that happening here.
You really have no idea how badly you're being played. Please go to youtube and search for Pallywood. Also check out this article. The people of Gaza and the West Bank are being used as tools in an ongoing propaganda campaign aimed at turning public opinion worldwide against Israel. They fire rockets at Israel from locations that put their own innocent civilians in harms' way. The goal is to entice Israel into returning fire, and in doing so killing the innocent women and children nearby. Why is it that the palestinian refugees living in squalor across the border in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria are completely ignored? Israel actually provides humanitarian aid to the West Bank and Gaza, providing food and basic necessities. In fact, Israel regularly brings refugees from these two regions into Israel for medical treatment. This does not happen in the other refugee camps controlled by Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Where is the outcry when Syria drops bombs from a jet indiscriminately on the palestinian refugee camp inside it's border? Israel has agreed to numerous peace deals brokered by various world leaders. It is always the Palestinian leadership that fails to agree. And so they continue to launch rockets at Israel, and they continue to wage a war of propaganda.
WTF, seriously kids died in that Israeli attack, their grieving parents are carrying their dead bodies!
And you think its CGI'd??? Seriously?
When you hear the news about a shooting, do you think it's a Halo mission video!?
the picture looks like it was repainted - it's practically ready for print, and not just for printing on a news story but as in ready to print to be glued on a wall as a mural - in that way it's nice.
the other pictures from the scene do not look like that, and thus look more real, and less like they're from a movie poster commemorating the tragedy.
anyhow.. the telltale is that the guy "forgot" the raw.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It was my first thought when see it...
I know. TFA says the guy is claiming it is indeed one raw file. I don't know if allowing HDR processing is allowed, but as you said, it doesn't seem like it's outright cheating.
Well it's just not usual for the same file to be loaded multiple times like be did. The JPEG which the photo is based (one of the issues is that the photographer has not provided the original RAW file) has multiple conversions from RAW in the data. That isn't normal. Normally you convert once unless you are slicing images. Suppose it was me. I would have converted it once. If I found that I didn't like my edits (light balancing, cropping) I would discard the jpeg by saving over it rather than editing it. Or I would have saved it as a new file. It's perfectly reasonable that he made multiple edits of the jpegs using the original RAW but it is not usual.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Don't get me wrong, photo-journalism is powerful stuff! What I don't get is why this kind of scene has to be the one that's chosen to represent a photographer's competiton entry? Does a competition justify a death scene of children? I don't even care if the pic is photoshopped or not, this is wrong.
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
This analysis is very dubious, and the shadow analysis is just wrong. The people are in shadow -- they are not lit by the sun -- so you wouldn't expect the shadows on their faces to be determined by the sun. In fact they are illuminated by the sunlit wall, so the shadows are perfectly consistent.
To be sure the lighting is odd, and I wouldn't be surprised if the photographer had lifted the lighting on and around the people. But this is not proven by the analysis, and in any case I don't think that kind of alteration should be disallowed.
Finally the fact that the same group of people are visible together in a completely different photo is surely evidence that the original scene is highly plausible. In fact it becomes less probable that they were grouped and photographed separately, and the composite theory (for which I see no evidence anyway) becomes positively unlikely.
so, what you're saying is, Israel made a faked video ( I haven't looked at any of your links). What does that have to do with this photographer photoshopping this image?
You know, both the people you like and the people you don't like can make modified photos or video, right?
That's a cool story, bro.
I see no reason to believe that the picture in question has been created by using several photos and copying/pasting people or heads around, but the lighting DEFINITELY looks "fake" (heavily edited) to me. Not only the light, also the colours. For example, the old guy (2nd from the left, holding the left child) - his head just looks unrealistically bright. Or the glasses guy two to the right of him. He definitely is in the shadow, yet his face is not dark at all. And the colours - on the hackerfactor page, compare the face of the guy holding the right child in the "fake" pic with his face in the picture just below that one. In the unedited pic, his face is a dark red/brown, completely unlike the world press photo picture.
So - completely faked? No. But definitely heavily edited, and then it's a question of whether they wanted heavily edited pictures in their competition, or instead want "unaltered" pictures. In other words, whether they want pictures which "wow" the observer because the photographer captured a special, noteworthy moment or because the photographer used Photoshop to make a picture TECHNICALLY "perfect".
Silly question: How do you do multiple conversions from RAW? Is that an embedded JPG within the RAW file?
Just that Lightroom just overwrites the previous JPG for me, replacing the whole file rather than updating it. I don't use embedded JPGs though, I just publish when needed.
My RAW files on the other hand will show multiple edits on multiple days. I take the photo, I load it into Lightroom (which changes it), I apply my own changes, I may come back another day and apply other changes. I may make a virtual copy so that I can have two different photographs from the same RAW (e.g. different crops, B&W vs Colour, different contrast curvers, etc).
No idea how any of that impacts the XMP data though :)
It doesn't really matter whether the photo was changed in Photoshop; just the photo itself, the lighting, the angle, and the subject matter are designed to manipulate the viewer's emotions. Press photography and photo journalism is probably the most dishonest form of reporting because it pretends to be authentic, but the the message is so strongly under the photographer's control and the picture and moment are so unrepresentative.
This isn't 'photoshop'
Simply put it's selective filtering and editing as typically afforded in modern day photography software such as Nikon Capture NX
In fact both photos are highly edited - one photographer/editor will manipulate the exposure, colour, contrast to suit their eye as opposed to another. But the content of the photo is NOT manipulated.
So effectively you are seeing the results of two different edits, either by the same photographer (unlikely) or two different editors.
It would be similar to the result between two photos shot at the exact same time and darkroom processed , with darkroom manipulation by two different photographers. The difference is the tools offered in the digital age allow much greater variance in the end result.
I took one look at the photo and it looks like a cartoonish painting. That's what a normal photo would look like if you set the noise reduce filter to 100% in Photoshop. WTF? Are they honestly claiming that came straight from a camera?
My first thought was "uncanny valley". The people don't even look real.
Huh? The people look real, it's just the lighting seems a bit strange.
. It may look fake only because
Because it is fake. If I was standing there with the photographer, the image he created wouldn't have been what I saw.
He deliberately muted the colors, to take your focus away from the vibrant colors. He highlighted the faces, to well highlight the faces. While he didn't add detail to the photo, he did change the lighting. Made it lighter in some, and darker than others. NOT something the naked eye would see if standing there.