Photoshopping news ?
Looks like Times of India is not only good at violating copyrights, its also good at photoshopping images to exaggerate the content. I am all for using photoshop to enhance the photograph, but not in journalism to enhance the news itself.
And for those of you who think this is a printing issue, its not. The other photos in the paper including all the Page 3 photos have the right contrasts and saturations.
Kalyan,
I completely agree with you.
In that case, TOI has been around for quite sometime and we have been feed junk news time and again and I take this very much in heart. The real issue is why and should TOI do this,.. we need to have a proper platform to address this. TOI is not going to be bothered about the news which I recieve but rather bothered about the reginoal SALES. I would be better off hearing something from someone and not from TOI.
Regards,
Anand
Shit…you pre-empted my “printing issue” comment. 😉
violating copyrights???
Wait a sec, could you please explain the discrepancies between these two rather interesting sites?
http://felis.in/mom/Site/Welcome.html
and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/expeditions/stories/published/by/kalyanvarma
Now talk about copyrights…
Mr Concerned Citizen 🙂
I would request you to visit the ‘official’ web page of the documentary : http://www.iconfilms.co.uk/web/Mountains_of_the_Monsoon
Concerned Citizen….unconcerned about not doing ones homework or writing before thinking…
Concerned citizen indeed. Not concerned enough to leave an email address?
I would not so much be bothered about increased contrast. I don’t see them having added/removed some elements/entities in the original image. Ok, they have overdone it a bit, but I think I will just shrug it off as poor quality work. It would trouble me if they had tried to add some extra fire/smoke to the image. Plus, the original image anyway has a poor contrast. If the same image was shot in some small P&S camera, sometime even in-camera processing would have enhanced the contrast(ok, not so much). Brightness/contrast are parameters that in any case can rarely be replicated to precisely match the environment, and I don’t really see a need for it.
Arun,
I do not agree with you. I take a very high line on how much I edit my photos. I send me photos for editorial use and they are usually in geological/science/wildlife mags. The rightness of the photograph and the correct representation of the scene that i saw is critical. Initially my benchmark was to never use selective editing. Selective editing according to me was wrong and was crossing the line. But then I realised, its not what tool you use, but what you are trying to show or hide. You can totally misrepresent an image by just playing with levels and channels. You can make a day into night, afternoon into evening. These are ok for posters, but not for editorial.
So the real line is not ‘mis-presenting’ what you are seeing. In this case, the contrast makes the smoke darker.. making it look like it was a big fire. But in reality most of the smoke was inside the building, and from the outside it did not look dramatic.
At the first glance, I did not realize that it appears as though the smoke is intense. But yes, it is does appear so. From your response, I assume your contention is that it makes the fire appear bigger than it actually seems in the original photograph and not simply the increase in contrast. Point taken. 🙂
I was wondering if the incident with your photo and this image manipulation are merely freak occurrences or is it something that has been happening and we are only now taking notice of it.
Just a quick google and I found this..
http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/?p=1285
They should stop the main issue and focus on city supplements. As far as I know, that’s the only thing most people see when they subscribe to ToI.
Also… moving mouse over textbox results in hand pointer… I don’t know if u intended it to be that way..
hey kalyan,
been looking at your blog for sometime now. some nice posts.
I am taken aback by this instance and also sad that some publications have to do this to sell.
despite knowing the paper’s edit values, this really stands out.
how did you manage to access the original picture?
And I dont even like what they have done to the photo! The havent fixed it, just screwed it up!
here are few more their shit act:
http://www.jocalling.com/2008/09/copyright-infringement-toi-again/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twilightfairy/2720464496/