If you have something* crossed you can tell a lie.
*fingers or legs.
2 Likes
That’s why I always have a rubber mallet available. Works wonderfully in situations like this, and the time to heal is nowhere as long as what other people will tell you.
3 Likes
Not a problem for me either and I’m considerably older than the child. My right hand can do it easily unaided, while the left only gets it most of the way crossed.
1 Like
I just tried, and now I have a sprained middle finger. Thanks Louis.
5 Likes
He’s doing it on purpose. It’s the Plantagenet hand sign for white power.
9 Likes
Yeah, that’s the same error as the one @anon34399329 pointed out with the broken white line. In this case there’s a tile line that doesn’t like up. And they kind of tried to blur it over.
What’s funny is that all these signify that it was a human doing the photoshopping. (I have to deal with these lining up errors all the time when photoshopping.) None of those errors look like the kind of errors AI makes.
So either this was all photoshopped by hand from existing photos, OR an AI made it and then a human went in and tried to correct some obvious discrepancies.
3 Likes
I mean it gets worse as we look at it, but I’m pretty impressed with how AP and similar immediately had issues with it and started all this noise. There’s been plenty of pictures that have come out that were obviously tampered with but this one - bang on the money with it being bad from the beginning.
2 Likes
I guess that makes me Royalty! Woo Hoo!
2 Likes
I don’t much care about the royals, apart from the basic consideration I would extend to most any person, so I truly hope she’s OK for the sake of her children.
But, this joke is the funniest one I’ve seen.
8 Likes
Yes, the photo was badly photoshopped and I can understand the AP’s displeasure with it. However I don’t understand the insistence that there’s something nefarious going on. We know that virtually all photos appearing in mass media have been retouched to a degree, if only to correct colors or to remove the dog that was taking a dump in the background as the shutter was snapped.
It seems to me that what we have here is the result of an incompetent Photoshop artist being told, “Fix that wrinkled sleeve and make Kate’s fingers look less bony.” As a barely-competent Photoshop retoucher myself I have no trouble messing up photos this way without any villainous intent.
1 Like
As other’s said, that’s real. Young kids have much more flexible fingers, and some people even more so due to genetics. And kids are weird and doing weird things all of the time.
I think I know what happened. I don’t think any of it is AI. I think they took a dozen photos, and then used them to composite the best looking picture. Because getting 3 kids to look right in a photo, all at once, is a daunting task, and our Instagram addled brains needs these things to look perfect.
Only either the person doing it was just ok at Phototshop.
OR
I have seen an ad for one of the new phones (not sure if it is Samsung or iPhone) where the mom takes a several pictures of the family on vacation, and then uses an app to pick the best photos of each person and it melds it together. And I am sure that isn’t prefect and you get things like some blurry spots on the edge or things not lining up just right.
Some of the criticism I’ve seen is just silly - like a kid crossing his fingers. Kids do that. Or the windows looking weird. They just over painted the pane frames and haven’t scraped off the excess with a razor blade.
I dunno. I am kinda icked out by all of this. At first glance it looks fine to me. I am not sure who the people are who start staring around looking for things that are off. Is it because they are Royalty they expect things to be perfect? The conspiracy she’s not OK after the surgery? Well if that is the case, leave them the fuck alone. If she isn’t ok and they put this out, it just shows the unreasonable pressure to be thrust upon the spotlight when they should be resting in private.
If she is ok and they just put out a meh photo - uh - so what? Christ, you’re going to give people complexes.
6 Likes
News agencies wouldn’t allow an inconvenient dog to be erased.
Agencies, he said, “don’t manipulate pictures. The things that agencies can do - we can crop a picture, we can tone the picture, to make sure that the exposure is right, that the colour is right”.
“What photo agencies will not do is rearrange or move the content of a photograph,” he said.
“You must remember that newspaper picture desks, news agency picture desks are looking at tens of thousands of pictures a day and there is always a great pressure to get a picture moving out to websites, to the next step in the process. So, there is always that pressure to move things quickly.”
2 Likes
I mean, I think it’s exactly that, no need to look further.
I fully agree, leave them alone, especially if she’s absent due to health issues.
But people treat the royals like public property, and so they notice when photos of someone haven’t been released for months. So then she or the palace responded by publishing this picture, clearly to say “look, here she is, she’s totally fine and healthy.” (A dated newspaper casually in the background would have been a little too obvious, though I wouldn’t have put it past them.)
So then it’s a bit rich when this photo, clearly submitted as proof that she’s ok, has been faked.
The public shouldn’t be demanding photos of Kate, they should just let her be. But I think the juxtaposition of this photo’s intent and its effect is mildly noteworthy.
2 Likes
It looks like they just used a snippet to cover up a bright spot of green that would have contrasted with everyone’s winter clothing.
Because everything is some conspiracy now, especially if it involves someone rich and powerful, like the Princess of Wales. 
It can no longer just be “someone made a mistake” or whatever. It has to be evidence of some nefarious plot.
3 Likes
4 Likes
Well… Kate’s kids looked like they had fun at that Willy Wonka Experience ™.
1 Like
Kate is on record as being a fairly keen amateur photographer, so her futzing around with Photoshop for a bit on her own pictures is at least not wildly implausible, IMHO. Having said that, she may have other stuff on her mind just now and may have given it to the intern on the press team instead.
3 Likes
This story is everywhere and it’s stupid and inconsequential. Have Midjourney make Kate a minotaur. Make the kids identical. Give them eyeball fingers. Put it all in every paper to force our awareness of our betters.
