'Expert' Zooms In, Sees Pixels, Uncovers Obama Photoshop Phraud

[Hum]

Apparently, my previous article on the famous "Situation Room" photo tapped a nationwide nerve. The response ranged from some eye-opening tips on other photos to a few perplexed criticisms as to the motivation for Photoshopping a Situation Room photo.

The answer to that latter question can be summed up in one simple thought: To hide the truth. Obama was out golfing while the OBL mission was unfolding, and the administration needed the Situation Room photo op for public perception -- to give the illusion that he's presidential.

Obama's entire "Composite Presidency" and administration are orchestrated in this fashion. Not only is the photo's legitimacy in question, but so is the narrative illusion behind it. Obama knew of OBL's location for a year and refused to act. The CIA admits that there was "no live video feed," as implied by the iconic White House photo. It is anyone's guess what the captive audience was looking at, but it wasn't the OBL raid. It was recently reported that a highly lawyered CYA memo was drafted that made it clear that the military would take all blame for any errors, while Obama would claim all glory for successes. Not surprisingly, the real heroes seem to have a problem with this form of spiking the ball and using our brave SEALs for political gain. Why would Obama need to Photoshop the Situation Room photos? For the same reason behind everything else he does: to influence perception in which everything is about Obama.

As a follow-up to the previous article, a second "Situation Room" photo will be the target of discussion here. For those who would like to download the image, a high-resolution version can be found here. This White House Flickr link is a great place to check for high-resolution sizes of many of the White House photo sets released.

At first glance, the image overwhelms the viewer with a massive backside of Obama's jacket -- oddly oversized shoulders and arms supporting another small-head redux. Any more photos like this, and one might start speculating that Jeebs is the inspiration.

In all fairness, the initial impression leads the eye to believe that the beige fabric under the right armpit belongs to Robert Gates' pants (standing near Obama on the right). However, if that were the case, then who would be attached to the pant leg under the left armpit? It's not intuitively obvious, and it takes the viewer a little time to eventually come to a conclusion that these fabric strips are side panels built into the jacket design. Maybe the New York Times found the presence of this fabric an odd distraction as well -- and the reason behind their cropped version.

Even with this oddity solved, the image is not without significant problems. Moving up the Iron Man-like shoulders to the blurry Jeebs-sized head, zoom in for an extreme close-up of the right neck edge and ear. The right edge of the neck is missing a small but important piece -- it suffers a disappearing act as it approaches the jacket edge and displays a transparent gap (where a phone sitting on the desk can be seen through the neck).

The right ear is also inconsistent along the defining edge. The top ear rim edge is blurry but still clearly visible (similar to the left ear edge), but as the eye travels down around the right ear edge, an abrupt chunk is taken away from the outer ear rim, and the remaining pixel edge transition is significantly sharper (less blurry) for the lower portion.

full article

[Guest]

There's a guy behind the dude with the blue shirt, it's blindingly obvious!

Oh and that hand? It's the guys hand behind him, look at the reflection, he has his hand up to his face but his face is concealed behind the other guy, while his hand is not.

[PsYcHoKiLLa]

Well since you had "phraud" in your subject, I'll take anything below that with a massive pinch of salt. You're obviously one of these uneducated opinionated republicans who forgets that Bush spent billions, killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq for absolutely no reason and STILL failed to catch or kill Osama. So now that he is dead you're spitting out the pips of your sour grapes at the current president.

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

1) There is a person not pictured in anything but reflection because the dude in blue shirt is bigger and obscuring them.

2) The hand belongs to the above person.

3) No ear missing, it's a blurring effect often cause by contrast by the two colours of the desk and papers.

[Guest]

3) No ear missing, it's a blurring effect often cause by contrast by the two colours of the desk and papers.

Yes, it's quite a usual optical effect from bokeh.

[Guest]

Well since you had "phraud" in your subject, I'll take anything below that with a massive pinch of salt. You're obviously one of these uneducated opinionated republicans who forgets that Bush spent billions, killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq for absolutely no reason and STILL failed to catch or kill Osama. So now that he is dead you're spitting out the pips of your sour grapes at the current president.

Wow... I think this is what people talk about in the "why do you post less in the forums" thread. Before you edited your comment to include the extra stuff, it was ok I guess but this is just a guy posting an article from another site without any sort of comment on it. You're jumping to conclusions somewhat here. Personally, I think all of the points raised about the photo have very straight forward explanations, just someone looking for something where there is nothing to be found. It was probably taken with a very wide angle lens and then compensated for distortion, making Obama look weird.

Anyway, I'm sort of sidetracking here which is one of the things I, myself complained about there being too much of, on Neowin so I'll leave you to it :p

[floopydoodle]

Oh dear god some people are complete morons.

Anything they don't understand just has to be a conspiracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

[+ir0nw0lf Subscriber²]

Well since you had "phraud" in your subject, I'll take anything below that with a massive pinch of salt. You're obviously one of these uneducated opinionated republicans who forgets that Bush spent billions, killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq for absolutely no reason and STILL failed to catch or kill Osama. So now that he is dead you're spitting out the pips of your sour grapes at the current president.

ROFLles. We'll also take anything with a grain of salt from a person with a username consisting of mixed capitalization.

And yeah, I got mixed letters/numbers in my username, but not making absurd comments. :rofl:

[AJerman]

Yeah, this is ridiculously dumb. All of these so called proofs are easily seen to be wrong. Some people will stop at nothing to try to make Obama sound bad.

[Hum]

Well since you had "phraud" in your subject, I'll take anything below that with a massive pinch of salt. You're obviously one of these uneducated opinionated republicans who forgets that Bush spent billions, killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq for absolutely no reason and STILL failed to catch or kill Osama. So now that he is dead you're spitting out the pips of your sour grapes at the current president.

LOL -- I did not write the article, nor the title .... :laugh:

I simple point it out for your consideration.

Mara Zebest is a graphic artist and co-author for a number of Adobe product books, including the Inside Photoshop series, which typically exceeded 1,000 pages, published in at least ten different languages around the world. She is also tech editor for numerous books for both Adobe and Microsoft products and has worked closely with the Cold Case Posse (CCP) for Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) in providing evidence on Obama's forged birth certificate.

[Guest]

Regardless of her experience, I believe she is promoting her personal political agenda on her blog which seems rather republican themed? (which is generally a pastiche of what being American stands for) I still stand by the explanations which have been stated here, there doesn't seem to be anything majorly wrong about the photo and some of the stuff she comes up with is a bit of a stretch. For example, if they didn't pixelate a part of the image, even if it says confidential, it probably really doesn't matter if people can see it.

Oh and on a 5th look, I think he looks so huge because he's in the middle of taking his jacket off.

Ultamately though, why fabricate this photo? What would they have gained from it? Was she implicating that Obama is sat next to a pool sipping ice tea all day or something? As stated before, it would be easier to stage a whole photo than composite it together.

[The Laughing Man]

Couldn't help but laugh my ass off at the comments on that site.