
People Call My Photos Fake but They're Not - shawndumas
https://petapixel.com/2019/03/01/people-call-my-photos-fake-but-theyre-not/
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leftyted
> I do have to say that all of my shots are indeed ‘Photoshopped’. I always
> work on my images to make them look good on print and social media. I change
> contrast, vibrance, saturation, make color adjustments, etc., so you can
> call them ‘fake’ in that regard. But I don’t change the moment.

I guess it isn't totally clear what "fake" means. But it doesn't seem wrong to
say that processing your pictures in photoshop makes them fake.

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fenwick67
Yeah, they're fake in the sense that "they're not what came out of the
camera", but not in the sense that "this scene never happened".

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aaronpk
No picture you see is exactly what came out of the camera. As the author
points out at the end of the article, if your camera outputs a jpg image, then
it's already made its own decisions of how to manipulate the raw data.

~~~
kurtisc
And post-processing for the lens, or to compensate for having twice as many
green sensors as red/blue.

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sfilargi
A hill in Netherlands? No wonder people call it fake...

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tapland
THIS GUY! I was laying in to him on reddit just a few days ago for him
consistently claiming that his pictures are single photographs, when he then
says the same photographs are made up of 'multiple shots'.

It's no difference from fake imaging we've had since before photoshop ever
existed. Intentionally screwing with the development to create something that
has never been seen by the naked eye.

And yeah, the problem is him posting it to r/earthporn which specifically is
for real scenes that look like real life, and not posting to r/photography or
r/pics, while only reluctantly admitting that the shots are composites.

This one, by him, posted in r/earthporn does confuse me a lot:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/a8tzbf/top_down_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/a8tzbf/top_down_view_of_the_bottom_of_a_glacier_river_in/)

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amarshall
> says the same photographs are made up of 'multiple shots'

On Reddit or in the PetaPixel article? As in the latter the only reference I
see to multiple shots is for a panorama (which is possibly the least-
controversial way of combining multiple exposures).

> r/earthporn which specifically is for real scenes that look like real life

Is it? There’s nothing in the subreddit’s rules about that. In fact its rules
specifically state: “Panoramas, Image Stacks, Composites, and images edited
via Photoshop or similar software are allowed”.

~~~
tapland
> On Reddit or in the PetaPixel article?

On reddit, which is where he's been angry about his photos being called fake
or unnatural.

> Is it? There’s nothing in the subreddit’s rules about that. In fact its
> rules specifically state: “Panoramas, Image Stacks, Composites, and images
> edited via Photoshop or similar software are allowed”.

Yes, but there are finer rules about different things. Super long-exposing the
sky in 1 photo and a lake in another for a night shot looks cool, but is not a
landscape photo for earthporn, since it usues techniques to make the actual
landscape darker and it could be moderated away usign the 'silhouettes' rule,
but they seldom are. They shouldn't be there at all (as stated in the extended
FAQ but in sky/space/water/whateverporn instead).

The picture I linked above needs to be a 'natural landscape', but isn't a
landscape at all, and probably has never looked like that to anyone seeing it,
ever.

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deschutes
I consider these photos fake. It has nothing to do with how the photo was
taken or edited and everything to do with how closely the photo corresponds to
my perception of reality. To me, great photos are always pushing this boundary
but these clearly break it. That said, I can appreciate the photos for what
they are.

I remember the first time my partner saw the milky way. She was disappointed
because in her mind it was supposed to look like one of these photos.

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robbrown451
The photographs are amazing (the volcano spewing a Milky Way is just awesome),
and I empathize with the photographer's frustration.

However, if his complaint is that, in general, people are too quick to be
skeptical of things they see on the internet, well, I can't exactly get behind
him on that one.... :)

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pishpash
I think it's just a rhetorical device to write an explanatory article.

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robbrown451
Yes I am not in any way faulting the photographer or the article. Just
reminding people of a counterpoint to a potential takeaway (which is rather
obvious anyway, hence the smiley)

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offsky
Nearly every astronomy photo you’ve ever seen of a planet, nebula or galaxy is
“fake” because they use multiple exposures and filters and software to process
them. Does that make them any less amazing or less real. I don’t think so.

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kayamon
lol they're all Photoshopped as hell.

In the first one with the sunset, you can see where the sky meets the dark
landscape and there's a weird black glow that bleeds out from the ground.
That's what happens when you blur an image and blend it back onto itself,
perhaps if one was trying to get a 'bloom' effect in Photoshop.

A demonstration: [https://imgur.com/a/vMA6dm3](https://imgur.com/a/vMA6dm3)

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Insanity
Did you read the article? The author says he used Photoshop on all of them..

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kayamon
I did read it thank you. The author, if he admits his photos are Photoshopped,
should not get all upset when people claim his pictures are Photoshopped.

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stordoff
He's not getting upset that people are calling his photos Photoshopped - he's
getting upset that they are calling them _fake_. They're maybe punched up a
little in Photoshop (colour, contrast), but that's not fake - you do that with
(more or less) everything that's shot RAW.

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devoply
[https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=8497eb5680338dbc87...](https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=8497eb5680338dbc87b173d9c554248e690c1098.65749)

[https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=675fe6f23e33beb5fd...](https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=675fe6f23e33beb5fd96fc4401ec0f0ea9d96ff9.51676&fmt=ela)

[https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=cde26cacf7826ac00e...](https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=cde26cacf7826ac00e606ef06020251c5ce183d0.63594&fmt=ela)

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gesman
Could you elaborate on meaning of these?

~~~
lolc
They probably show a JPEG diff: The quantization errors introduced by JPEG-
compression. This is relevant to the "fake" discussion because often the
source material of shopped images is JPEG compressed and has JPEG-artifacts.
If one combines source material of different shots their JPEG artifacts will
likely not align because of the different resolution, offset, and compression
levels of the parts. This means that the inserted parts of an image will have
a different noise-profile which can often be spotted just by looking at the
diff.

I'm not trained to read these diffs and somebody who's cheating professionally
would know to cover their tracks. So while they can be used to detect forgery
they cannot disprove it.

