All photos are suspect these days, as image-editing software lives on our phones, our laptops and in social media filters.
When England’s royal family admitted that the Princess of Wales edited a photo of her family sent to news agencies on Mother’s Day in the UK, almost everyone had something to say.
The debate that raged about why the photo had been so heavily edited, and why Kate Middleton was forced to admit to using Photoshop, came to an abrupt halt on Friday when Middleton announced a cancer diagnosis in a video message posted on Instagram.
But the weeks-long discussion over the edited photo is a reminder that we’re in a brave new world of manipulated images. As even prominent figures post modified photographs online, it’s never clear how much editing has been done to a published image and people can’t be blamed for being suspicious.Why did Instagram place a warning on the photo?
Kate Middleton, Prince William’s wife and England’s future queen, underwent abdominal surgery in January. Despite the palace’s original statement that she wouldn’t be seen until after Easter, rumors about Middleton’s whereabouts reached a fever pitch on social media.
The buzz kicked into high gear on March 10, when a seemingly everyday family image of Kate and her children was sent to news agencies to mark the UK’s Mother’s Day. But then those groups sent out a rare notice requesting that their clients no longer use the photo, saying it had been manipulated.
Within hours, the royal family admitted the photo indeed had been changed — and the princess herself took the blame. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she said in a rare apology.
The Prince and Princess of Wales have more than 15 million followers on their Instagram account, and if you look at the now-infamous, heavily edited photo now, you’ll see Instagram has blurred it out — and once you click to see it, the social media company has plastered it with a red-text warning reading, “Altered photo/video. The same altered photo was reviewed by independent fact-checkers in another post.”
Click on the warning, and you’ll get a message from Instagram noting, “Independent fact-checkers say the photo or image has been edited in a way that could mislead people, but not because it was shown out of context,” and crediting that to a fact-checker, EFE Verifica.
Instagram did not respond to a request for comment on why some edited photos earn a warning and others do not.So what was different about Kate’s editing?
Pete Souza, the former chief presidential photographer who worked for presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, weighed in — and he’s got some personal experience with photographing Britain’s royal family. Last week, Souza reposted a photo he took of young Prince George meeting President Obama in 2016. He explained exactly how he edited that image and how it’s different from the Kate Middleton fiasco.
“The digital file was ‘processed’ with Photoshop, a software program made by Adobe that virtually every professional photographer uses,” Souza wrote on the photo of Prince George. “Yet my photograph was certainly not ‘altered’ or ‘changed’ in content.”
Souza said he cringed when news stories referred to the royal picture as being “photoshopped,” noting that publications and news organizations have “strict policies” on using Photoshop.
“Basically, the accepted practices allow a news photograph to be tweaked by adjusting the color balance; the density (make the raw file lighter or darker); and shadows and highlights,” Souza wrote.
