[click to enlarge - opens in new window]
An eagle eye TLS reader from Italy sent in the above gem. It seems that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi (above, far left), is getting some media flack (and flack at home – his wife is threatening divorce) over some photos of him at a party that were published in Chi magazine. Chi insists the photo above is authentic, but I beg to differ with them. Not only is the above photo a Shop, parts of it are of a Photoshop Disaster quality. Here is the first thing that screams to me that this was Shopped…
Example of obvious (and generous) use of the clone tool. How many right shoulders and elbows can a man have? There’s no denying it – that is some of the sloppiest Photoshop work I’ve ever seen!
When I looked at the photo further I noticed some discrepancies in the pixelization and shadowing. Note in the image above how the Prime Minister’s hand and jacket details (like buttons) seem a little fuzzy while the woman he is standing next to is in sharp focus. This could have been caused by taking a photo of the PM at a lower resolution and blowing him up slightly to add to a photo with higher resolution. Also, please note the shadows – the one under the woman’s elbow is short and dark, while the Prime Minister’s is taller and lighter.
Metadata from the image indicates it has been opened and saved using both Photoshop 3.0 and a couple times in Photoshop CS4. (I discovered this by simply opening the image with notepad in Windows and reading it.) So it has been opened and re-saved a few times for whatever reason. That’s not hard evidence, but it does point towards some form of tampering.
There are many other photos floating around of the Italian PM which were supposedly taken at the same party, but what I have found is very low in resolution and too poor in quality to discern their authenticity. From what I understand, this is BIG NEWS in Italy and many folks are debating whether the images are authentic or not. If anyone out there has any other photos relating to this that are of a higher quality, please email me and I would be happy to analyze them. Also if anyone from Italy that is hearing about this on the daily news would like to keep TLS posted, please leave any updates or opinions on this debate in the comments.
Thanks to Simone for the submit!
Related articles… (My apologies to readers who don’t understand Italian. I couldn’t find any related articles written in English.)
Giallo sulle foto, ‘Chi’: non sono taroccate [Italy Global Nation]
Fotoğraf skandalı! [VATAN]
Le foto di Berlusconi e Noemi sono ritoccate con Photoshop? [Asylum Italia]
Berlusconi: le foto del compleanno sono ritoccate? [La Voce]
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It says Photoshop CS4 because I used that to assemble the image from screenshots i took on this page:
http://www.corriere.it/Speciali/bigVision/noemi/big_Vision_corriere.html
Still looks shopped though.
ElChE – Could you please give our readers the translation (in English) to the page you linked in your comment?
It says:
“Noemi’s party
On blogs and forums people say that these photos are shopped. To see the photo in detail click and drag the mouse on the box in the lower left.”
Thanks ElChE!
Great find, this a badly, badly ’shopped image!
As you said, first you have the awful clone stamp job on the far left. If you crank up the midtones using the levels adjustment tool in photoshop, you can clearly see that whoever shopped it painted in the whole left side with a black paintbrush and then tried to clone his suit to extend as far left as they could get him. It also shows you just how bad a clone job they did! See photo below (sorry if its broken HTML, not sure if your comments accept HTML)
Example 1:
Also, I noticed that the woman on the left has a slight grey hue around the left side of her head…pretty much the same color as the light grey wall on the right of the photo. I think that all four people were against that grey wall originally but they cut the left half of it out to add in the ‘party scene’ on the left side. Take a look at example #2 below – I blew it up and you can see that edge of the wall was clearly drawn with a brush:
Example 2:
Looks to me like all four bodies were definitely together judging from the champagne glasses,but looks like they put in some extra effort to make the Italian PM look bad!
Hey Jason! Your comment got kicked into my spam folder (sorry about that) My comments accepts links, but not photos. If you email me photos tho I can post them if you wish.
You bring up a good point about the greyish halo on the older woman’s hair! That does indeed look strange.
I thought that might happen. Here are the links!
Example 1:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/5906/italianpm01.jpg
Example 2:
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/9094/italianpm02.jpg
Jason – you know what I just noticed in your example #1? Look towards the bottom of the photo at the PM’s jacket – there is are some “chops” along the bottom left side and on the bottom right side of his jacket there’s a spot that looks like belongs to the shawl of the woman he is standing next to! (Shoddy erasing work perhaps?) It isn’t noticeable with the color balancing of the original because the darkness hides these flaws, but they really stand out when the contrast is blown out like in your example.
Ohhh yeah, I do see that! Also notice the PM’s glass – the woman’s chin is weirdly refracted in the glass…looks like they moved where the glass originally was or something.
Man, this is shaping up to be quite the disaster! This magazine needs to find someone who at least knows what they’re doing if they’re gonna call out the PM like that…
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