Kate image withdrawn by three news agencies amid 'manipulation' concerns | Hacker News Reader

Kate image withdrawn by three news agencies amid 'manipulation' concerns

bbc.com

54 pointstimack36 comments

I get the feeling that the editing was done by an IA editing tool of some kind.

Here's what Google has to say about the one in their pixel 8.

"If you’re trying to take a group photo, even if you take multiple shots, chances are someone is always looking away or blinking — we’ve all been there, especially if you’ve ever tried to take a photo with kids. To take the stress out of getting that perfect group shot, the new Best Take feature in Google Photos uses a series of similar photos taken close together to help you automatically create a blended image with everyone’s best expression."

Yeah people say photoshop but it looks to me like some sort of phone processing. NYT article about that on the pixel 8 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/technology/personaltech/g...

Probably William took several photos and then some button popped up saying something like 'enhance' which did that.

Here's another article that shows where the image gets suspicious:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1875909/princess-kate-m...

I’m not much of a royal watcher but I do find this story fascinating. I suspect the reality is going to end up being boring: people at the palace (or William himself given he apparently took the photo) are a combination of arrogant and insecure enough that they took a perfectly good but not quite perfect photo and felt like they had to edit it until it looked exactly like they decided it should. But we’ll see.

Probably, but doing that for a high profile person that is the subject of wild speculation because of a recent absence isn't smart.

Arrogance overpowering sensible decision making feels like a royal trait, at least.

It is very normal for professional photographers to pose subjects separately or use head shots on the body of a different photo. In this case, the lighting on all of their faces is too consistent and similar, and indicates their faces were photographed separately and then composited. You would be surprised by the number of movie star promo photos you see where they have put the actor’s head on a different subjects body

But that's not normal for journalistic photos, which are assumed to be a record of an event that actually occurred.

For sure. I would imagine a portrait photographer may not understand the distinction though

Whether that matters or not when the photo was given to the AP its origin was misrepresented. And whoever did that likely knew what they were doing or at least confirmed things as true they didn’t actually know to be true.

Is this a journalistic photo, though? It’s reportedly taken by William himself. It’s a PR photo, at best.

This photo was submitted to AP, Reuters, etc., who distributed it to newspapers. These news agencies have strict standards for photos they distribute, which is why this one was withdrawn.

Good point. Where is the line bw pr and journalistic though? Is it ever ethical to alter a photo that will be seen by millions, affecting their opinions, even if for PR?

I know from personal experience that getting one really good picture of four people when three of them are kids is quite difficult. To be clear, by "really good" I mean everyone is eyes open, looking at the camera, with a reasonably pleasant, somewhat natural facial expression and body pose. It can be done in a single photo but it can take a lot of tries - and with kids the hit rate percentage falls rapidly after the first dozen snaps. If you aren't lucky enough to get "it" in the first couple minutes, the whole process devolves into a torturous endurance session with ever-diminishing returns which can get pretty unpleasant for all involved. The longer the session, the higher the chances a meltdown or tantrum from one of kids will end any hope of getting the photo in one shot. Occasionally the meltdown is from the photographer :-).

In my case, I just composited together a handful of the very similar shots into one photo in which everyone's eyes were open, looking at the lens, etc. Because kids can't not fidget, especially when asked to hold a pose, the registration between almost identical photos taken seconds apart is often not perfect. I'm certainly no royal watcher but for a self-posted social media photo (vs some official press or journalistic photo), this seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, if only to spare the kids a stressful experience from which they are likely to develop resentment toward official PR duties.

Applying Occam's razor, I think this explanation is far more likely than some nefarious palace scheme (in which case, I'd expect the composite to be expertly done). The fact the composite is imperfect supports the idea it was done fairly quickly by one of the parents or one of their non-expert personal assistants and not carefully reviewed by a cabal of master media manipulators orchestrating some conspiracy.

This seems to a bit more informative as to the issues:

https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1766947758529822803/...

And for those, like me, that are way out of the loop in the whole situation I found this to be an interesting if long read:

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/03/this-is-just-weird-buzzfee...

This thread has been flag bombed and it currently on the last page of HN, item #636

Am I the only one to think of the text editor when I see Kate without much context in a title ?

no you're not ;-)

Thr good old days, who wouldve thought we use Microsoft editors on Linux now

There was a story a few weeks ago about some odd picture taken, and it turned out to be motion blur compensation / HDR / some other computational method creating artifacts. That’s my first instinct looking at this pic, but who knows!

Princess of Wales: Kate apologises for Mother's Day photo 'confusion'

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68534359

    The Princess of Wales has apologised "for any confusion" her Mother's Day photograph caused, after five agencies retracted it over editing concerns.

    Catherine, in a statement posted on Kensington Palace social media, said: "Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing."

    The image, taken by the Prince of Wales, was the first of Catherine to be released since her surgery in January.

This isn't a simple composition; entire details were ai created. You can see sections around her hair that look like stable diffusion inpainting. The texture will immediately be cut off and a very softer blurred ai generated part will continue. There are details all around the image that look like that. The jacket and both sweaters aren't original for instance. Large sections of the background on the left were clearly added in as well.

Virtually the only original parts of the image that are unmodified are the faces and hair from the neck up and fingers on the two older children. The person who made this clearly had nothing to go on.

The intersection of Kate's head and her son's chin looks suspect to me, and there is no wedding ring to be seen. All very strange.

There’s stuff doing the rounds on twitter from a investigative journalist that’s pretty dark. This image stuff is adding fuel to that fire.

I'm hungover on a Sunday, got a link?

https://twitter.com/ellievhall

The stuff I read also claimed that the children and her parents haven’t been seen either.

Don't leave us hanging. Which journalist?

Ellie Hall

Just search for Kate Middleton.

The (soapy) speculation is that Kate is either ill, dead, or missing for some other reason.

It is quite strange to post - and then have to kill - a montage with obvious flaws when a real photo should have been so much easier.

Wow that is really soapy. That’s like Kim Jong Un level speculation.

Lengthy March 7 piece with much background on difficulty of dealing with UK Royal Press Officers, and a timeline of Kate related events.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/03/this-is-just-weird-buzzfee...

by Ellie Hall.

    “I cannot emphasize enough how out of character it is that a royal press team went on the record in response to what is essentially gossip.”

Putting aside the terrible Photoshop job, I found it interesting that the two youngest kids have both crossed their middle fingers as some sort of gesture. Surprised that I didn't see any mention of that in the articles.

If she's taking longer to recover from surgery than expected, why don't they just be honest and say that?

It seems someone removed objects from the kids hands? Maybe a branded thing or something personal. Maybe an animal.

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