The Doctored Economist Cover: We All Live in a Photoshopped Age

Here is the thing to keep in mind: Photos are images, not reality.

Such silliness over using Photoshop on photos. I beleive that certainly photos may be touched up, even in "news" coverage, to best illustrate the story in print.

Also certainly, images have been altered for as long as painters have touched brush to canvas, or brush to cave wall.

Check out your family snapshots and those from any skilled photographer will be at the least be carefully arranged. If the person with the photo has any talent at all, he/she can touch up a photo on a computer. As an individual, I have used Photoshop on every snapshot I've taken since 1997. You will never see a photo of me, my family, or even a pet that I haven't touched up to improve the quality of the image. I have no qualms about removing a pimple, a few extra pounds, or a person.

I don't see how they could photoshop an out of focus bad quality picture into a focused and clear picture at a different angle. Look at the relation between obama and the structures in background. They are different in the pictures. Could they be two different pictures?

This cover certainly doesn't bother me. It's a magazine cover, not a news photo. It is making an editorial point, not a factual one. How many unretouched photos are printed on magazine covers? I have no idea, but I'm willing to bet the percentage is very small. I would think every reader knows this and doesn't expect there to be the accuracy demanded of a newspaper.

Everything obama does is a "slight of hand"...

Obama didn't have a problem with the media photoshopping his picture in Hawaii when they have him six pack ab's? I think he was upset that they didn't get his pre-approval before they printed the picture. I can remember the media showing a split screen with President Bush and American troops in coffins.

I don't think that taking her out for dramatic artistic effect is really all that bad.

The author, Walter Shapiro wrote:

"But whatever the motivation (and I assume that it was non-ideological), deliberately falsifying a photograph is unequivocally wrong for reasons that should be obvious to every cub reporter since the days of Jimmy Olsen."---

I feel compelled to point out that Jimmy Olsen did photoshop a picture that ended up on the front page of the Daily Planet. In the comics Clark Kent is married to Lois Lane and as Clark Kent he wears the wedding band, but he remembers (usually) to take it off when he dons the Superman costume. However, he forgot once and Jimmy snapped a photo of him fighting a bad guy and the wedding band was visible. Jimmy realized he'd stumbled upon a secret and so he "erased" the wedding band before sending the picture to press to protect the secret that Superman is married. He did get in trouble, though, because someone else also got a picture of the wedding band and so the big story became "Who is Mrs. Superman?" but not at the Planet because Jimmy doctored the photo.

As to the above Obama photo, it seems to be like a cropped photo from days of old. In fact the angle looks similar but not identical. I'm afraid this doesn't smack of evil or slanted intent. It doesn't even smack of Jimmy Olsen sloppily but naively hiding Superman's secret. Now had it been a photo of Obama looking at his kids' vegetable garden and then cropped out and pasted on the beach, that would be bad and a blatant misrepresentation, but this? No, of course not. He was there. The other people on the beach, unlike Superman's wedding band, didn't tell a different story and so they were cropped out as many before them have been cropped out for the covers of magazines for decades.

Sayberspace and Baldwinboby seem to imply that Obama was behind the doctoring of this photo. How absurd - it was a foreign publication that doctored it, not the White House - can you read?

Amazing how far people will stretch facts to paint the picture they want. If Obama had wanted a picture alone, he would have stood alone. Get real!

Is it 2012 yet?

Th at shot looked to me as if they had used a shot of the pesident that fit the message they wanted to convey and put the back drop they wanted behind it. I am shocked that people thought that shot would be contriversial I was under the impression that presidents and other elected officials would be to busy to pose for special setup shots but apparently he goes out of his way for that sort of thing. Here in the LA area it was reported yesterday and on many other times as well that Tony Vallar spend his days and nights showing up at sporting event or anything else and can not even focus on work. And they report that he only "works" 11% of the day on official business that seems to point out that these types hire people who represent special interest groups and they in turn take this country further in the wrong direction and hammer the business's after all they are evil right. The administration then put a rubber stamp on the work they do. Obama seems to embrace all the radical ideas that I thought we had proven do not work. The notion that we can yank the engine of productivity out of our country and do every other socialist type program out there. When those country in Europe are buckling as we move toward that they are moving away from it.Our economy has been dismal low exports and manufacturing. And this President was the only one touting more spending to stimulate the economy at $700000 per job that sounds like a bad idea and always did to me.The best course of action in my opinion is to help people start new business's give the experts to call lower startup costs and have experienced people guide them at first. And relief wells should be drilled