By Tony Abu X. | Friday, September 16, 2005 | Link |  35 comments

As can be seen in the picture below, the area of the photo containing the paper has had its contrast heavily boosted; the histogram, analyzing the area enclosed by the dashed line, shows that most pixels have been pushed to either white (the peak on the right side of the graph) or black (the peak on the left side of the graph). There are almost no pixels that have an intermediate brightness; all smooth gradations of brightness are gone.

By contrast, the right side of the photo showing the President's hand has a brightness distribution you would normally expect in a real-world scene: there are many pixels at all brightness levels.

Note that the artificailly enhanced text is darker (actualy black) than even the darkest shadows in the un-manipulated part of the photo; this is not what you would expect from pencil -- even a magic marker would not appear that black in a photo.

Further evidence of the above manipulation can be seen in the band of non-enhanced text surrounding the index finger. Here, the person selecting the manipulation region tried to keep away from the finger to avoid affecting it (which would have made the manipulation even more obvious.)

So what's wrong with publishing this photo?

First of all, publishing this photo is a violation of privacy (using a telephoto lens and image editing software) with the intent to protray the president in a negative light. In a time of war, where US military and diplomatic success depends (at least in a small part) on the overseas image of the President and the office, Reuters' crude manipulation and attempt to belittle the President amounts to propaganda for the enemy.

Second, this may also be a violation of UN rules for vistors at the UN building since this type of imaging can be used to spy on delegates.

Finally, by not stating that they have heavily processed the photo in image editing software, Reuters violates journalism's ethical standards once again (I have written in detail on manipulative photojournalism previously). Any manipulation for any purpose other than improving image qualty must be explicitly stated up front.

UPDATE:

Charles now links to Reuter's explanation that "The white parts of the picture were overexposed, so a Reuters processor used Photoshop to burn down the note. This is a standard practice for news photos, [Reuters picture editor] Hershorn says, and the picture was not manipulated in any other way."

This of course is total nonsense. Reuters is lying about the type of processing they used, and the reason they used it:

If this area really had been overexposed and then "burned down", you still wouldn't have the extreme contrast we see here (in fact burning would reduce the contrast). And they are implying that the goal was only to improve the quality of the photo. In fact this is not the case. The processing, because it is so extreme, was clearly intended to reveal the text of the message, and actually makes the quality of the photo much worse -- note the harsh, unnatural look of the papers and paper clip