Ok, so, this is something that has been bugging me for a while now, I assume you’ve all come across a picture on the internet whether stumbling or receiving an email from a friend. And this picture always makes you think something amazing is going on, whether it's the phenomenal timing the photographer had, or the complete ridiculousness of the event occurring in the image. But then, as if a big black rain cloud suddenly popped up over a parade, someone needs to make a comment deeming such image fake or Photoshopped.
And of course, these illusive and mysterious commentators feel the need to make themselves seem professional, stating they examined the pixels and so on and so forth. Something that immediately seems to damn any photo it’s said about, and at this point, that’s is just about every photo ever loaded onto the Internet. So here is my issue with this statement that everyone and their mothers uncle seems to throw around on the Internet. One, if the person that is doing the Photoshop is good enough that you cant tell its a Photoshop just by looking at it, then chances are they edited the image in a large file size. What does this mean? Well personally, I shoot most of my photographs with a Canon 40D, and when I edit in CS4 I edit at the largest file size I can, this means that at a resolution of 72 dpi my image is 3888×2592, and that’s simply if I shoot in Jpeg. That’s a lot of pixels to go through in order to determine whether an image is fake or real.
Now as most of you may have experienced, loading an image up onto the internet either for Facebook or Myspace, or any other system, you can’t exactly load a gigantic image, you need to size it down, usually to within a 4 or 5 MBs and into a jpeg or a png format. Now being one that has done a decent amount of editing to an image before, each edit adds a lot of data to an image file. Layers upon layers of this and that and so on and so forth, and then those layers need to be flattened into one layer and then that image needs to be resized, normally smaller. Now every one has a different workflow, but this seems to be that standard at my school (By the way, I feel I should mention, that when the FBI needs to authenticate whether a photo is real or not, they call a Professor who teaches at my institute.) so I can’t imagine it being terribly different throughout the rest of the educated population.
I guess the main point of me rambling on and on about this process is that in the end, when the editor resizes the image before uploading it on, the software normally bases its pixel layout based on the colors and contrast of the image, so each time you resize, you change where the pixels are. Unless you’re combining images and the resolutions between them are vastly different, there is no evidence placed solely in the pixels that says when an image is shopped. It takes training to see a Photoshopped image, at least when its done properly, and even if it’s not done properly you don’t need to examine the pixels to see that, 9 times out of 10, you can just look at the image and see that something has been added or changed. So please, take your pixel examining bullshit, and go somewhere else.
Oh, and can anyone tell me if the image at the beginning of this post is Photoshopped or not? I mean it looks legit, doesn’t it?
It must be photoshopped. It looks like there are see creatures in the grave. Other than that though, it definitely looks legitimate. Very cool. :)
ReplyDeleteI don't get it. What about it is so unbelievable (considering it's a Jeff Wall image)? Is this the image that's being debated or are you saying generally?
ReplyDeleteAlso, well said.