Mike Palij harkens back to the ancient days of 1985 to post the
warning that photographs are not to be trusted. My personal
history as a photographer would take us back even further than
that. Photo retouching of the print to remove warts, wrinkles,
and other unwanteds has a long history. Kodak sold inks of
different "grays" to paint over such imperfections. (I say gray
because "gravitas" prints of executives and other male VIPs had a
slight olive/brown cast.) More elaborate ruses involved printing
from multiple negatives with care retouching of the print and a
copy-camera construction of a new "original" negative. I did a
lot of these to improve my darkroom skills.
Dragging this back to psychology: One aspect of digital
retouching that I find so distressing is how bad is the attention
to detail. There was an article about 4 or 5 years back in the
New Yorker about the king of digital retouching, with a few
example of his work. I since can recognize his touch. It
consists of dramatic chiascuro coloration which are based on
multiple-suns across the scene. The left-half of the photo has
sunlight coming from the right, the right-half has sunlight
coming from the left, and the middle of the photo is looking
straight into the sun or is enclosed in a setting sun.
Honestly, these poorly-retouched photos make me sick and I spend
my time chalking up the various retouching mistakes, wondering
who would buy this trash retouching job. I think that the reason
that most people don't notice the issues is that it is an example
of the Thatcher illusion, where local cues dominate over
attention to the global scene.
You can spot many of these mistakes easily by looking at
different sections of a photo and saying (1) Where is the sun
located? (left or right); (2) Is it a cloudy day (flat light) or
is it a sunny day (stronger shadows); (3) Is it early in the
morning or towards evening (reddish tones); and (incredibly!!)
(4) does image resolution vary across the scene?
The easy ones to investigate in the New Yorker are "outdoor" shots.
Multiple contradictions across sections are an increased index of
poor digital manipulation.
Ken
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected]
Professor
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
---------------------------------------------------------------
On 5/4/2011 5:41 PM, Mike Palij wrote:
Back in July 1985, the magazine "The Whole Earth Review" published
an article by Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Jan Kinney titled
"Digital Retouching: The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything".
I read it when it came out and one can access a PDF of the article here:
http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/040324/f98095dd2c6a93a397662cfd97a246e5/WER-INFO-69.pdf
The point of the article was that photography, through the use of
digital manipulation, could not serve as evidence of anything unless
one was sophisticated enough to detect changes in the photograph.
That magazines, newspapers, and other mass media outlet routinely
"touched-up" photographs using pre-Photoshop technology is almost
besides the point -- how many images have you seen in your life that
were altered but you were not aware of the alteration? Brand et al
pointed this out 25 years ago yet today we still have people who think
that a photograph is evidence of something. Jon Stewart on the Daily
Show last night had a photoshopped image of bin Laden holding up
yesterday's NY Post newspaper and his "birth certificate" -- is this
proof that Bin Laden was still alive? No. A photo of a dead bin Laden
is only as good and trustworthy as the people who took the picture.
And even that is not enough; evidence from a variety of sources
needs to be coordinated and verified in order to show that the
preponderance of evidence is in favor of a particular interpretation,
in this case, that bin Laden has been killed. For some people no
amount of evidence will be enough. One needs to critically evaluate
the evidence that is available, understand it, and base inferences and
conclusions on the evidence. Though some may still believe in the
old saying "seeing is believing", it have to be pointed out to them
that maybe DNA evidence, even if it difficult to understand, is
better evidence.
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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