A little photoshopping, Scarecrow?

How about them pics! I was half-expecting the final image to show a group of pale, dour-faced cadets standing solemnly behind a blue/green rotting corpse, with a big “WAR IS BAD” banner displayed in the background. Or maybe I am overreacting — the faux-crossprocessed look is big these days.

The actual article isn’t bad. The cadets come across as intelligent, thoughtful and morally serious. I wish more journalists and elected officials were like that.

(via Rachel)

UPDATE: I’ve posted, below the fold, a composite image showing the original photos from the articles superposed over versions of the same photos that I spent a few minutes roughly editing in Photoshop. Even though the photos were made in different settings with different lighting, they all appear more natural after approximately the same types and amounts of color and lighting adjustments (red levels: 1.15; green levels: .85; blue levels: .90; midtone levels: 1.15-1.40). IOW, it appears that the photographer or photo editor dialed in extra blue and green, desaturated the reds and darkened the images overall. There may be another explanation but it sure looks as though the magazine was trying to make these cadets look less than bright-and-rosy. The grim facial expressions add to the negative effect and, consequently, bolster my impression that the image manipulation here was intentional.

UPDATE 2: OTOH there’s this photo from an unrelated article on a newspaper’s Web site. In this case it looks like the photographer inadvertently used the wrong white-balance setting and they ran the photo without correcting the color cast. I’m sure it’s unintentional, since the accompanying article is a favorable profile of the subject of the photo. Could a mass-circulation magazine make a similar error with images used in a feature article? Maybe, but it seems unlikely.

2 thoughts on “A little photoshopping, Scarecrow?”

  1. I wonder what people from this organization would say about that article.

    When I was at West Point, a couple of years ago (one of my projects was Thayer Hotel there), I didn’t notice any pale faces. If anything, rather too robustly red..

  2. Good article. Or, good in a way. Actually, the people depicted in the article are of such high quality that a piece-of-shit article which attempts to degrade them and make them look like naive cannon-fodder cannot succeed in its purpose. The quality of the cadets shines through. The childish behavior of the leftist teachers these young cadets have to deal with, and the maturity of their responses to them, is very impressive.

Comments are closed.