Oh the Things People Do
So Bridgette cover the new Roskam ads pretty well, but if you notice something about them…
Look closely at the pic of Tammy in the first ad.
Here’s a close-up:
Here’s the black and white of the original AP photo
Notice the eyes. Even with the granier version there’s one thing that sticks out if one were to try and recreate what was done–the eyes are darker than any normal process would create.
They OJed it up to make her look more foreign is the best interpretation I can come up with. Instead of simply a little blurry and dark they have become the black eyeballs of a demonic possession or just a fererner.
Impressive douchebaggery.
October 18th, 2006 at
Holy shit! You can see the photoshop lines!!! They don’t even try to blend it in!
I totally missed that. Good catch.
October 19th, 2006 at
> …the eyes are darker than any normal process would create
I agree that they’re OJing her up (and emphasis on the eyes could be particularly noteworthy considering all of the ads’ focus on immigration), but that doesn’t really look all that exotic. It’s most likely due to just an overgenerous use of Unsharp Mask, which is one of the most standard of Photoshop tools. This is what it sort of tends to do when you set Radius too high.
Elsewhere on the Photoshop tip, however, have you seen the RNCC’s anti-Bean ads? (“Liberal… Pelosi… Liberal… San Francisco… EXTREMIST LIBERAL…”) They use a particularly unflattering photo of Bean (naturally). From the looks of it, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been given a sort of reverse Katie Couric treatment. Something else to look into?
October 19th, 2006 at
sigh…
Republicans resorting to racism. I’m shocked.
Wait. No, I’m not.
The whole illegal aliens thing is a ploy to stoke xenophobic fears.
There is no principled argument that illegal aliens are among the top problems facing the country.
October 19th, 2006 at
they also darkened her frames, possibly to accentuate the “slanty” eyes
October 19th, 2006 at
> they also darkened her frames, possibly to accentuate the “slanty” eyes
I wouldn’t say it was a happy accident for them, that they didn’t intend to enhance the “slanty-eyed fur’ner” look, but I don’t think they selectively darkened anything. Look at her lips and hair, too. It may be a nit-pick, but I think it’s the difference between stock standared political ad OJification and something worse.
I mean, it’s not like they went in and painted on extra slanty eyes. It looks to me like they (1) downsampled the image to give it a rougher, pixellated, surveillance-camera look, (2) bumped up the contrast to an unflattering degree, and (3) oversharped, as I mentioned above.
These are all standard tricks, especially . This doesn’t mean the Roskam folks aren’t racist (for picking this particular photo to manipulate and for cropping it the way they did, obscuring the fact that that black line is the glasses frame ear support), but I don’t see anything beyond a “normal process” here.
That they’re douchebags, however, remains uncontensted.
October 19th, 2006 at
Okay… out of sheer intellectual curiosity, I went into Photoshop to try to recreate it. While the general look of it was easy to duplicate following the steps I noted above, one thing they did that I hadn’t noticed before was to stretch the image horizontally (to about 115% its original width), which is a pretty significant, if not imediately noticable, deformation.
This is roughly the same thing I suspect might have been done in the Bean ad, but I don’t mave images to compare for that one.
October 19th, 2006 at
Ah, so Duckworth is really the “Yellow Peril.” How blind of me not to have noticed!
Can this really play in 2006? Making her look like some oriental “Dragon Lady?”
“Soo sorry, I must remove your fingernails if you refuse to talk!”
October 19th, 2006 at
At the health club I run on a treadmill in front of a row of tv’s. The RNCC runs this ad and the bean ad back to back to back. It’s always playing on at least one station or another. And regarding the bean ads: they’re horrendous. To look at the picture they use you’d think she was 300 pounds or something.
October 19th, 2006 at
I think it’s just YouTube/video compression quality that is distorting the image.
October 19th, 2006 at
I heard about this over the weekend and wrote about it at Kos on Monday.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/16/154040/90
October 19th, 2006 at
Looks like the just increased the contrast, particularly the black levels, of the photo as all dark areas of the pic are darker. It could also be an remnant of the video compression which tend to equalize light and dark areas to flatter whites and blacks. Just a photog’s opinion.
October 19th, 2006 at
Please stop calling them douchebags. This is highly inappropriate. Would you really want one of them next to a pussy of someone you know? Instead, in the future, please call them colostomy bags.
October 19th, 2006 at
The clincher is the upper lip. Notice how the upper lip at the corner has been widened, extended, and filled. Not even close to the original if it had “only” been stretched, darkened, etc.
Indeed, they are a bunch of colostomy bag content.
October 19th, 2006 at
Caption for 1st pic: You die, Yankee Dog.
October 19th, 2006 at
I’ve been teaching Photoshop at colleges for years and am considered an expert. This is, no question, a simple use of the smudge tool. Try it on the original yourself.
October 19th, 2006 at
I think it’s simply a case of carelessly applied unsharp mask filter.
October 19th, 2006 at
uh… guys? I hate to rain on anyone’s venting parade (especially since I’m usually the first one to call the con-artists out on stuff like this), but, respectfully, I work in video and all of the so-called doctoring everyone is seeing can be explained by the effects video can have on photographs. Notice the horizontal lines in the image to the right of her face? And the wierd horizontal crud up at the top? A sure sign that we’re dealing with an image that has been transfered from digital format to video and back to digital format. This kind of transfer REALLY degrades a photo since video can only reproduce at 72 pixels per inch. This would explain the darkness around the eyes and the courseness of the image quality. Also, the stretched-out effect? That’s easily caused by the different aspect ratios that exist in Broadcast TV. Standard television is broadcast in 4 by 3 ratio. It is possible that this image was transfered to another common ratio of 16 by 9. This gives us the “letterboxed” effect we see so much nowadays, but one effect of this is that it can stretch the image horizontally.
At any rate, let’s be careful not to jump to conclusions lest we throw our credibility to the wind.
October 19th, 2006 at
I think her face has been “squeezed” vertically.
I took the AP version and, using Paint Shop, I resized the image to 85% of height and 100% of width.
The size is identical, and the appearance of the squeezed image matches the one in the ad.
I learned how to do this in the first place because I wanted to take a few pounds off of a face I was using on a web site. Stretch the face just a bit, and voila! Ten pounds of weight loss!
October 19th, 2006 at
doesn’t it bother anyone else that the ad itself is racist? who cares about the technicalities, which is all this discussion is. the fact of the matter is, this ad is trying to make tammy duckworth (half southern baptist, half asian) the equivalent of an illegal alien.
that bothers me, a lot.
October 19th, 2006 at
Mark: The clincher is the upper lip. Notice how the upper lip at the corner has been widened, extended, and filled. Not even close to the original if it had “only” been stretched, darkened, etc.
Simply not true. The image is easily recreatable through the steps I note above: downsampling, applying a high-contrast tone curve, over sharpening and a little stretching. I’ve done this myself and would gladly share my images if anyone really cares enough to ask for them.
Eric: I’ve been teaching Photoshop at colleges for years and am considered an expert. This is, no question, a simple use of the smudge tool.
I would willingly match my Photoshop expertise against anyone’s and can say that, no question, the smudge tool is unnecessary here.
Daveconn62: …Also, the stretched-out effect? That’s easily caused by the different aspect ratios that exist in Broadcast TV. Standard television is broadcast in 4 by 3 ratio. It is possible that this image was transfered to another common ratio of 16 by 9.
You can see the source video for yourself right here. Sure looks like 4:3 to me (and stretching this to 16:9 would deform it far too much to match the above).
I won’t flatly contradict you, but the real test would be to compare it to the images of Roskam himself at the end (or even Ted Kennedy’s in the middle) to see if they’re stretched out at all. As it is, I’ve taken a screenshot of Roskam from the end of the video and compared it against a headshot of him found online, and can assure you that it hasn’t been significantly deformed, let alone to the degree the image of Duckworth has been.
Bob T.: I think her face has been “squeezed” vertically. I took the AP version and, using Paint Shop, I resized the image to 85% of height and 100% of width.
Stretching it to 115% horizontally as I did would be effectively the same thing as squeezing it to 87% vertically.
So, when it comes down to it, I think they deformed her picture. Ultimately, anonyquack is right, though. It’s about the substance of ad, not the teche surrounding the photo.
October 19th, 2006 at
Sorry,
You’re completely wrong about this.
Placing the original over the second image and scaling it to match shows no additional distortions or modified features.
I will give you the consideration that the reproduction has gained contrast and the over sharpening has added slight halos around edges which are a kind of distortion but that’s all.
I will provide a QuickTime movie clicking back and forth between the two if you’re curious.
david
October 19th, 2006 at
> Sorry, You’re completely wrong about this.
This is getting ridiculous. I never had any intention on drawing this discussion out further (lord knows I don’t wish to be mistaken for Charles Johnson) but here we go…
This image contains my three versions of the photo. The first is just with the basic manipulations I first mentioned (downsampling + high-constrast Curves adjustment + Unsharp Mask). The second is the same, stretched 115% horizontally (per the numeric controls on Photoshop’s Options bar). The third is ArchPundit’s screen capture from the YouTube video.
For comparison here are the same three versions lined up horizontally. Note that the vertical scale is all but identical.
QED, no?
Finally, here is a screen capture of Roskam from the very same video compared against two versions of this headshot. The version on the left is unretouched, the version on the right is stretched to 115% horizontally (as with the Duckworth image).
I’d say it’s relatively clear that the image of Roskam seen in the video was not stretched in the same manner as Duckworth’s (as we would expect it to be had the entire video been stretched according to Davconn62′s suggestion).
Alright… I’m done.
October 19th, 2006 at
I just compared the images in Photoshop very carefully … it’s unquestionably been stretched horizontally, to make her look fat, or whatever. That doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to do.
As for specifically photoshopping the eyes, I can’t see anything like that when I use “difference” to compare the two images … the differences are global. Yes, they make her look worse, but it’s not like they specifically slanted her eyes.
However, the stretch seems bad enough.
October 20th, 2006 at
> Yes, they make her look worse, but it’s not like they specifically slanted her eyes. However, the stretch seems bad enough
Exactly. Kind of nasty, but not necessarily egregious. I’m sure we’ve all seen a lot worse. On the substance, though, the ad is still an unmistakable piece of trash.
October 20th, 2006 at
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