Demos at graphics conferences are often interesting to watch because they offer a sneak peek at technologies that may soon become available to the general public. The video above is a demo for “PatchMatch“, an algorithm developed by researchers at Princeton and Adobe. Although you might be unfamiliar with PatchMatch, you’ve probably heard of its most famous feature: Content Aware Fill. Only a small piece of this amazing technology was introduced in Photoshop CS5, so the amazing image manipulations seen in this demo are likely a sneak peek into what we’ll be seeing in Photoshop CS6.
Update: Erin from Reuters contacted us informing us that this is in fact a genuine, non-manipulated photograph. Here’s a good explanation of why it’s real.
Reuters published the above image as an Editor’s Choice photo yesterday, and almost immediately readers began leaving comments questioning whether the photograph was Photoshopped. The debate soon spread to other websites, including Reddit, and it appears that the photographs has since been taken down (though it can still be seen in its original slideshow from last week). Read more…
A huge photo scandal erupted over in Sweden this past weekend after a well-known and award-winning wildlife photographer admitted to faking some of his photographs. Terje Helleso — a nature photographer who was named Nature Photographer of the Year by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 — was discovered to have published multiple images in which stock photographs of hard-to-find animals were Photoshopped into nature scenes. Read more…
The debate regarding what makes a photograph “truthful” or not is probably as old as the art of photography itself. By sheer coincidence, there were a couple interesting articles published today on this issue, and written from two different points-of-view. Read more…
Apparently the universe isn’t perfect enough for Apple’s products. David Kaplan, a keen-eyed physics professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, noticed that an entire galaxy is missing from the image of the Andromeda Galaxy used as OS X Lion‘s default wallpaper. Read more…
Image forensics company Fourandsix set up an interesting page called “Photo Tampering throughout History“. It’s an interesting timeline of famous photo manipulations, going as far back as the 1860s — the above left image of General Grant was found by the Library of Congress to actually be a composite of three separate photos! Pretty good for not having access to Photoshop, eh?
Advertising Standards Authority, the ad industry watchdog in the UK, has banned an advertisement by Lancome featuring Julia Roberts for being misleading, stating that the flawless skin seen in the photo was too good to be true. Parliament member Jo Swinson first brought the ads to the authority’s attention, and later told the BBC:
This ruling demonstrates that the advertising regulator is acknowledging the dishonest and misleading nature of excessive retouching. Pictures of flawless skin and super-slim bodies are all around, but they don’t reflect reality.
This comes about a month after the American Medical Association called upon ad agencies to stop the “altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image”.
The North Korean government is the latest to get caught trying to feed a poorly Photoshopped photo to the media. This past weekend the Korean Central News Agency — a state-run organization — released a photo of citizens trying to wade through floodwaters in Pyongyang, saying that heavy rains flooded farmlands, destroyed homes, and caused deaths. After initially passing the image onto its members, the AP decided to issue a “kill notice” (yup, that’s what it’s called) a day later to withdraw the photo, stating,
The content of this image has been digitally altered and does not accurately reflect the scene [...] No other version of the photo is available.
The problem was the fact that the clothing worn by the people in the photo don’t appear to be wet at all — even where the water meets the pants! It appears the water level was much lower, and the government tried to exaggerate the image, perhaps in an attempt to appeal for international aid.
The AP has sacked photographer Miguel Tovar for “deliberate and misleading photo manipulation” after Tovar cloned out his own shadow from a feature photograph. The Photoshopping came to light after an alert photo editor spotted a strange looking dust pattern in a photo of Argentinian children playing soccer. Read more…
When Calle Hoglund had his buddies over one night editing a music video, he got the idea of creating a photo manipulation with his friends looking out from photo frames. The project took three hours from start to finish, and luckily for us they created a stop-motion behind-the-scenes video showing how it was done.
Workflow for the Time Lapse: Shot with my 40D every second then uploaded it to Lightroom3 where I cropped them before exporting to Quicktime Player 7 where the Timpe Laps is being made. Finally I added the two Time Lapse movies to Final Cut Pro where I added the pics and music.
It’s a fun glimpse of photographers being creative.
