I suppose right about now you are sick of hearing any more of BP’s BS. Whether it is buying google rankings or not telling their douchebag CEO to keep his petty thoughts to himself – I know one thing’s for certain: BP’s PR disasters have just about rivaled their environmental one.

Well, now they have another disaster on their hands and this one is of the Photoshop variety…

[click to enlarge]

Someone over at AMERICAblog News noticed that something was amiss in the photo of the control room posted to BP’s website (above). The photo shows a bunch of guys sitting around looking at monitors of oil spill footage. I guess BP was trying to show that they were just sitting there helplessly watching oil gush into the Gulf like the rest of us? I dunno. Anyway, looks like they weren’t even doing that because the photo was faked. Yep, that’s right! BP couldn’t even get a legitimate photo of guys sitting in a room watching oil spill footage on monitors. Those photos must be hard to come by at BP. Check out the closeup below – you can easily see the halos – and by halos I don’t mean the angelic kind, I mean the Seriously, you couldn’t even spend the 10 minutes it would take to do this properly? You are making it THAT obvious you don’t care? Why don’t you just kick us all in the nuts while you’re at it? kind…

The worst kind of halos.

AMERICAblog News has the complete rundown of the disasters found in this Shop, so check out the link to the enlargement above and see if you can spot them all before heading over there. It will be like a very, very sad game of Where’s Waldo? (And what’s even sadder is now the game is on to locate other PR photos BP has faked and people are finding them.)

BP has admitted that the photo was faked and that “… there had been no ill intent behind the alteration, and that the photographer had simply been showing off his Photoshop skills.”

Um, yeah, or LACK THEREOF.

[mouse over to see the original image]

Publicity chief for the Democratic Action Party in Malaysia, Jeffrey Wong Su En, thought it was a good idea to send out a press release (along with the above photo) stating he had been Knighted. It seems titles are all the rage in Malaysia these days, and short of “Duke” or “Lord” what better title could one have?

Well, Buckingham Palace begged to differ with Wong and it caused the British High Commission spokesperson in Kuala Lumpur to say, “We can confirm that we have no record of any honour having been conferred at any time by the British Government on Jeffery Wong Su En.”

OK, so where did he get the photo? From here – he just Shopped himself over Ross Brawn.

Wong still protests that he was, in fact, knighted despite the overwhelming evidence he was not. He is (rightfully so) now facing expulsion from his political party.

Related articles…

Malaysian politician faked pictures of knighthood from the Queen [Telegraph.co.uk]

Malaysian politico gets knighted in Photoshop [The Register]

Stir over DAP man’s ‘Sir’ title [Star Online]

Above Left: Cover of The Economist; Right: Original, unedited Reuters photo.

The Economist is under fire by the New York Times for editing a photo for their recent cover. To their credit, The Economist fully admitted to editing the photo and here’s what they had to say about it…

I was editing the paper the week we ran the image of President Obama with the oil rig in the background. Yes, Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the image (Admiral Allen was removed by the crop). We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.

We often edit the photos we use on our covers, for one of two reasons. Sometimes — as with a cover we ran on March 27 on U.S. health care, with Mr. Obama with a bandage round his head — it’s an obvious joke. Sometimes — as with an image of President Chavez on May 15 on which we darkened the background, or with our “It’s time” cover … endorsing Mr. Obama, from which the background was removed altogether — it is to bring out the central character. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead.

I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story. “The damage beyond the spill” referred to on the cover, and examined in the cover leader, was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America.

I was going to write up a lengthy post stating my opinion on this, but instead I think I will just go with: “What Stephen Colbert said…”

Above: “Image Restoration” taken from Part I: Fundamentals and Local Models of the Tutorial on Modeling Natural Image Statistics for Computer Vision by Siwei Lyu and Stefan Roth.

The Times Union recently had a write up on Assistant Professor Siwei Lyu from University at Albany. An excerpt from the article…

Computers allow digital photographs to be easily manipulated in such a way that the human eye cannot detect the forgery. But University at Albany Assistant Professor Siwei Lyu is training computers to do the important work that mere mortals cannot.

These days, it’s not hard to remake reality on your home computer, with Photoshop programs and built-in software on cameras that allows for immediate manipulation.

Lyu has developed a system that turns digital photos into a mathematical computer language that make it easier to investigate “photo-chopping” and determine the components of a natural image.

“We’re just playing detectives,” he said. “It’s easy to fake images.”

[Read entire article]

If you (like myself) are a true nerd about this stuff and want to read more on the work Lyu is doing, you can find links to his research here.

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Above is Paul the Octopus – a “psychic” octopus that the Germans rely on to pick the winners of World Cup matches. (Supposedly during the 2008 European Championship, Paul correctly predicted 80 percent of all German games.) Well, looks like someone is trying to artificially pump up (or hoax) Spain’s fan base. They took a photo of Paul from his “psychic pick” for the Germany-Serbia World Cup match and Shopped Spain’s flag (well, most of it – they left off the crest) over Serbia’s.

Related articles…

Desperate Spain fakes World Cup octopus prediction [NBC Sports]

Paul the Oracle Octopus Picks Spain Over Germany? It’s a Fraud [NowPublic]

UPDATE 7/6/2010: At the big event today Paul wound up picking Spain! See fakers? You didn’t have to even bother! Doesn’t it feel better when it’s for real?