Oh the Things People Do

> …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?

they also darkened her frames, possibly to accentuate the “slanty” eyes

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.

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.

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

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.

Caption for 1st pic: You die, Yankee Dog.

I think it’s simply a case of carelessly applied unsharp mask filter.

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!

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.

> 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.

> 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.