We don't airbrush our photos! Honest!

There has been a long-running joke in the publishing industry about the extent to which magazines airbrush photos of models before publishing them.  When the Oprah/Ann-Margaret scandal erupted, the joke enjoyed a brief comeback.

Now, Reuters appears to be latest outfit working to keep the joke alive.

On the left is a photo of Beruit, Lebanon, that Reuters made available on their wire service Friday.  After a firestorm of criticism over how fake the picture looked, Reuters retracted the picture and replaced it with the "corrected" image, which is on the right:

(Click for a full-size image)

You'll notice that I have cropped and sized both pictures so that they are approximately equivalent.  It is easy to guess that perhaps a photo editor wanted a photo containing a certain percentage of city and a certain percentage of smoky sky.  So he ordered a (very poor) photo artist to crop the photo and then make the smoke and sky appear bigger, so that there would not be a blank space at the top such as the one I intentionally left -- the "corrected" image does not have nearly as much sky as the altered image does.

Here is the image set again.  In the righthand image I have circled what appears to be the smoke feature that was "cut and pasted" in order to create the new clouds.  I have also circled a building in the lefthand photo that appears to be cloned -- you'll notice that the "clone" building (the upper one) does not appear in the righthand image:

(Click for full-size image)

The other thing I noticed about the doctored picture is how the images of the buildings have been manipulated with a contrast and/or unsharp mask tool to make them appear rough, as if they were damaged, and to make them appear blackened or burned-out.  What is obviously a smoke shadow in the righthand photo appears, at first glance, to be a burned-out city block in the lefthand photo.

Of course this isn't the first time that an image's contrast has been manipulated ...

I don't think the scandal is the smoke; rather I think it is the fact that Reuters was trying to pass off a doctored photo that purportedly showed large sections of Beruit bombed out or burned by the Israelis, when such large-scale damage was simply fiction.

Hats off to those who caught this blatant propaganda and exposed it for the world to see.

Perhaps we should take a look at these examples of staged propaganda shots one more time as well.

Update: The Jawa Report is reporting that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, the blogger who broke this story, has received threatening emails that have been traced to an IP address at Reuters.  Classy.

The story keeps growing: The photographer who took the questionable Beruit photo, Adnan Hajj, claimed in self defense that he was only trying to touch up his photo and "remove dust marks."  Uh, yeah, sure.

Rusty Shackleford at the Jawa Report has found yet another Adnan Hajj photo, released by Reuters, that has obviously been doctored.  Reuters has now killed that photo as well, and has announced that all of Hajj's photos will be pulled from its archives.

Drinking From Home blog spots a poor Lebanese woman, wearing the same clothes, lamenting the destruction of her home twice, in photos dated a week apart: "Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home owner in Beirut, or something isn't quite right."

And of course there is now a bona-fide blogswarm of pajama-clad writers poring over thousands of photos from Reuters and from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.  We'll see what they find...

ADDED 8/8: Another one, the body of a young man supposedly dug out of a pile of rubble --  yet the same man was alive and helping rescue workers find survivors in the same building earlier in the day.  Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has officially coined it "fauxtography."  I love it.