I don’t think the image was altered. No reason to. The person in the photo is holding a sign whose text is perfectly consistent with the topic of the protest, and a quick Google on her finds it consistent with her apparent political viewpoints.
It was taken by a pro photographer from a major newspaper.
There’s no real reason to have any suspicion that things aren’t as they seem.
As for the photo itself, all of you who’ve "analyzed" it, unless you bought a copy from the paper, the best image you have to work with is only 460 pixels wide. The sign in question is only 76 x 59. From this miniscule amount of information, it’s not likely anyone could say whether it’s been altered (unless it was, and was done badly, which is not the case). Add to that the high-compression Jpeg distortion, and there’s really not much to work with here.
The sign has been subjected to a bit of sharpening, it looks like. Jpeg distortion doesn’t usually put a bright border around a dark object like sharpening does, and the black letters have a bit of a halo. This makes it harder to see the original detail. BUT, if the sign was altered, sharpening *after* replacing the text seems very unlikely.
When I grabbed this photo off my screen, it came in with Photoshop calling it 72dpi. If you upconvert that to 300 dpi you’ll lose a lot of the pixelation distortion, and see that the text looks like a handmade sign should. Spacing is not perfect or consistent, alignment is not quite perfect on any line. Centering is quite good, though. Doing all that tweaking (like pulling the R in "profile" down a bit) in Photoshop and kerning to make it look handmade would be a lot of work that most folks wouldn’t bother with.
As for talk the sign is at the wrong angle:
1) The photographer is shooting with a long lens; with such a high level of zoom, she could turn the sign well off-axis in either direction with no noticable perspective distortion. Notice, not a single vehicle shows any perspective; everything’s square and parallel.
2) It’s possible that, since there was a pro shooter loaded down with cameras and lenses, kneeling in the grass to get a good shot, she responded by turning the sign to face the camera for a moment.
So basically, while it’s impossible to say it was not altered, there’s no sign whatsoever that it was, and all of you folks who are so sure it was are just making stuff up.
Besides, if I were altering it, I’d probably smear up the sign, twist it a little, and put a shadow on it or something, maybe even a fake reflection from a car window or puddle, to make sure it didn’t look the least suspicious to anyone. Asking if it was altered is really just asking if it was altered badly. If it was done well, you’d have a very hard time proving it, and nobody would be asking the question in the first place.
It was a good question, but I got tired of waiting for a sensible answer.
"g inski" wrote in message
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/ web/vortex/display?slug=watada06m&date=20070206
third picture in the series
photo editor says, "no way", we would not do that
i say yeah sure, and my camera automatically makes the lettering and centering perfect and leaves the rest of the sign holder blurred
just curious
thanks
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